Up-Updates regarding Oroville, CA, northeast of Sacramento, where 160,000 people have been ordered to evacuate because America’s tallest dam is having all sorts of problems. Here are tweets from the local newspaper editor:

That’s good news.

That’s in line with my top of the head calculations that they can lower the reservoir level one foot every maybe three hours by blasting 100,000 cubic feet per second down the damaged primary spillway. This appears to have stopped water overflowing over the concrete lip of the so-called emergency spillway, which is really just a concrete wall on top of a mountainside of dirt. When the reservoir level gets to 901 feet above sea level, water starts trickling over the 1,700-foot long concrete lip and down to the dirt.

This emergency outflow route had never been used in the 48 year history of Oroville dam. That was supposed to allow up to 250,000 cubic feet per second of outflow, but, not surprisingly, by the time they got to only about 12,500 feet pouring over the 1,700 foot long lip, they started worrying about the mountainside under the lip eroding away.

If the concrete lip of the emergency spillway gave way because the mountain it rests upon wasn’t quite there anymore, then the top part of the reservoir (maybe the top 30 feet?) would rush down the mountainside into the Feather River, wipe out the town of Oroville, and do who knows what damage to Sacramento 68 miles downstream. (Sacramento is not currently being evacuated.)

So they increased outflow down the damaged main concrete spillway up from 55,000 cfs to 100,000 cfs. That relieved stress on the emergency spillway. But …

Here’s the weather forecast, which is very good in the short run and very bad in the mid-run.

So they’ve got around 48 to 60 hours of dry weather to patch things up while they lower the reservoir.

And then another deluge.

If I’m reading this Weather Underground forecast correctly, Oroville is expecting 4.02 inches of rain in seven days beginning on Wednesday. That would be on top of the 34 inches of rain that have fallen in the area since last summer and filled the reservoir to the brim.

If they can continue to blast 100,000 cfs down the main spillway, and if that really lowers the lake four inches an hour, then they can lower the reservoir about 15 or 25 feet before it starts raining again.

Another questions is whether the upcoming precipitation will come down at higher altitudes in the reservoir’s watershed as snow (good) or rain (bad).

The first hit of rain on Wednesday or Thursday is likely to be warm, which is bad because it could help melt lower lying snow. But the later precipitation in the ten day forecast is likely to be cold and lower the snow level, so that’s good for getting through the next week or two.

Commenter James B. Shearer does the math on how fast they can drain the reservoir.

According to google the surface area is 25 square miles. There are 640 acres per square mile so 16000 acres. An acre foot is the amount of water required to cover an acre 1 foot deep. So to lower the level 1 foot you must remove 16000 acre feet of water. An acre is 43560 square feet so an acre foot is 43560 cubic feet. So 100000 cfs is about 2.3 acre feet per second. So you need about 7000 seconds or a bit under 2 hours to drop the level a foot. But that assumes no water is coming in.

Inflow into the reservoir had been running at 40,000 to 50,000 cubic feet per second for most of Sunday, or about half of the emergency 100,000 cfs they started sending down the main spillway around sunset.

But at 10pm inflow was suddenly down to 5,237 cfs. Perhaps they are impounding tributaries at upstream dams. Or, hopefully, all of last week’s big rain is down out of the tributaries by now. Update: at 11 pm PST, inflow is back up to 33,762 cfs. Here’s a graph of inflow by hour on Sunday

You can find a few dozen automatically updated Oroville Dam graphs here.

So it looks like the sharp dip in the late evening was only a temporary respite. However the overall inflow trend line is down due to dry weather.

I’m guessing that if it doesn’t rain, that inflow number will decline down toward about 10,000 CFS, which was the average inflow during dry days in early February.

So, if they continued to blast the main spillway at 100k, they could have a net outflow of about 90,000 cfs, or about 11 feet of lake level per day, best case scenario.

But if they continue to blast water down the main spillway, will that erode the 770-foot tall dam itself? I don’t know, but it would be worth worrying about.

And of course it’s going to start raining again, maybe on Wednesday. And it will probably rain for about a week for a total of 4 inches.

Unfortunately, the last set of storms that came through in early February and dumped 6.5 inches of rain raised the reservoir level by over 50 feet:

About 750,000 acre feet or 20% of the capacity of the reservoir was added between February 5 and February 11.

Inflow peaked at a little over 150,000 cubic feet per second on February 9.

This massive inflow was due to about 6.5 inches of rain falling from February 2 through February 9. That added over 50 feet to the elevation of the lake surface

Weather Underground is predicting 4 inches of rain for Oroville for the week beginning this Wednesday, so that might add say, 30+ feet to the lake, assuming the same level of average outflow down the crippled main spillway. Which is a big if.

It sounds like it’s going to be a very close run thing.

But here’s a question: how do we know this incoming rain storm will be the last big rain big storm of Winter/Spring 2017?

Heavy rains are normal up through the middle of March and then lighter rains into early May.

But, as the rains taper off in later spring, the snow melt in the Sierras speeds up.

Perhaps somebody ought to be wondering not just about the next 10 days but the next 100.

Perhaps there are some kinds of responses that might take a month to put into place, but could turn out to be very useful during, say, the Great Early April Warm Rainstorm of 2017 that suddenly melted the high altitude snowpack.

For example, the problem with both spillways is that they erode themselves. What if you could put in a pipeline or just a chute to pump water away from the vulnerable concrete structures and drop the surplus water away from their foundations and into a ravine below, say, the emergency spillway and then have gravity carry it down to the Feather River?

The problem is that you’d need something like 5,000 or 10,000 cubic feet per second of pumping capacity to make even a small dent in the problem.

Here’s another crazy idea: At least three tunnels were dug while constructing the Oroville dam: two for diverting the Feather River waters and one for a railroad. The rail tunnel was visible during the recent drought due to the low level of the lake

The two water diversion tunnels were dug in the 1960s to allow the Feather River to continue flowing while the dam was being constructed. They were each 35 feet diameter and had a combined capacity of at last 157,000 cubic feet per second, which they reached during the 1964 flood.

That’s a lot of cubic feet per second. Opening both would, theoretically, lower the lake about an incremental 18 feet per day, assuming the Feather River could carry that much water.

Two diversion tunnels were constructed for diverting water around the construction area. Diversion #2 is now used as an outlet for the water being utilized by the underground power plant. The 35 foot diameter size of the tunnels was chosen to withstand the flows of previously recorded floods on the Feather River. After final completion of the dam in 1967, Diversion Tunnels #1 and #2 were plugged. They excavated a system of tunnels for the powerhouse, some of which connected to Diversion Tunnel #2.

Personally, I would not volunteer to put on one of those old fashioned deep sea diver suits and go down with a jackhammer to unseal Diversion Tunnel #1.

But maybe there is something that could be done with Diversion Tunnel #2 from inside the powerhouse? That’s a potential 78,500 additional cubic feet per second, which could come in handy.

UPDATE: Evacuation ordered for Oroville, CA and other towns downstream of the immense Oroville dam along the Feather River. About 160,000 people need to leave.

KCRA in Sacramento is a good source of info. Here’s KCRA helicopter video from just before dark on Sunday that shows the lay of the land better than anything else I’ve seen:

They’re concerned that the Emergency (a.k.a., Auxiliary ) Spillway, which was never needed before Saturday, is eroding away. The Emergency Spillway is a 1,700 foot long concrete lip to the reservoir at a slightly lower elevation than the actual dam. It’s like the edge of your bathtub, if your bathtub was basically a big canyon. Water is overflowing the reservoir over the concrete Emergency Spillway lip onto a dirt mountainside and plunging down to the Feather River. But the overflow could erode the concrete lip, causing it to collapse, allowing the top 30 feet (?) of the immense reservoir, the second biggest in California, to suddenly head downhill toward Oroville, Sacramento, and the San Francisco Bay.

Department of Water Resources spokesman Kevin Dossey tells the Sacramento Bee the emergency spillway was rated to handle 250,000 cubic feet per second, but it began to show weakness Sunday at a small fraction of that. Flows through the spillway peaked at 12,600 cubic feet per second at 1 a.m. Sunday and were down to 8,000 cubic feet per second by midday.

So they have started letting water blast down the primary spillway, a huge concrete ditch, which has been eroding away for several days, to try to lower the reservoir before rains come again around Thursday.

They just started sending 100,000 cubic feet per second (99,969 to be precise) down the failing concrete primary spillway, up from the 55,000 CFS they’d been allowing to try to lessen damages to the concrete.

Presumably that will destroy the primary spillway faster, but whaddaya whaddaya? The good news is that inflows into the reservoir seem to be down to 42,369 cubic feet per second, so the reservoir level should fall.

It would be useful to know the arithmetic for translating net outflow of cubic feet per second into acre feet of water into change in elevation of the top of the reservoir.

Until it starts raining again, which now looks like Wednesday.

Of course, warm sunny days will also melt the snowpack near the snowline above the dam …

The 770 foot tall dam, itself, seems to be okay.

But a lot of things have gone wrong that weren’t supposed to go wrong, so …

————–

Original Post on early Sunday morning: The good news is the drought in Northern California is over, which is also the bad news.

Oroville in the Gold Rush country of the lower Sierra Nevada northeast of Sacramento is the tallest dam in America and its reservoir is the second biggest of the giant California State Water Project.

Here’s an old clip of what the Oroville Dam concrete spillway is supposed to look like, with water falling in an orderly fashion down the 770 foot elevation loss, only splashing up at the very bottom before falling into the Feather River:

And here’s what it looks like after the latest rainstorm as the bottom half of the spillway has more or less exploded, with huge chunks of concrete flying through the air, with the water carving a new canyon down to bedrock.

The engineers had to reduce the flow over the spillway to keep the top half from eroding away itself and undermining the integrity of the reservoir. But this inability to shed water from the reservoir faster than it flowed in from the recent rainstorm meant that the reservoir overflowed for the first time in its 48 year history.

Starting Saturday morning, water started spilling over the “emergency spillway,” which is actually just a 1,700 foot long lip of the lake that empties out onto a mountainside, kind of like the edge of your bathtub. The purpose of the Emergency Spillway is to drain the lake before it overflows the earthen dam itself, which could erode the dam on it’s less hardened down river side, which could conceivably lead to various other bad things, ultimately resulting in, more or less, no more Sacramento.

So far, the Emergency Spillway seems to be doing its job, although you’ll have new video Sunday morning to check whether this last-ditch system is working as planned hoped. But, best case scenario, the repair job on the Primary Spillway will likely cost nine figures.

This reminds me of SlateStarCodex’s giant current post on Cost Disease: why do so many different things such as public works projects, health care, and education keep getting more expensive?

I don’t know if there are any general lessons to be learned from Oroville.

But the body language of the public works engineers suggests some guilt and fear on their part. California was pretty broke a half decade ago, but the state could have afforded to fix the spillway recently if flaws in it had been discovered, but the staffers didn’t seem to inspect it terribly closely.

They don’t look like California’s A Team.

I wonder if the quality of public works engineers has declined as we’ve moved from the construction to the maintenance era. Fifty to 100 years ago, building dams was a highly prestigious profession. Waterworks engineer William Mulholland was perhaps the leading citizen of California and his rise and fall inspired a famous movie,

But few dams have been built in this century and mostly we just want the ones that we already have not to collapse. That’s not particularly attractive to top people looking for a career.

From the comments:

Dr. X says:
February 12, 2017 at 2:57 pm GMT • 100 Words(Edit-1764510)
One lesson is that governments build infrastructure that they believe will be permanent, and often do not build failure contingencies into the design or have a good Plan B if it fails.

Following the adage “two is one, and one is none” the designers of the dam probably should have built two identical concrete spillways, so they could alternate flow while repairing the one not in use. They sort of had a last-ditch backup plan with the “emergency” spillway, but that is not a spillway at all so much as an overflow, and they certainly can’t use that for an extended period of time while repairing the concrete spillway.

Busby says:
February 12, 2017 at 6:30 pm GMT • 200 Words(Edit-1764680)
Scenario 1: Young newly credentialed engineer from Ivy League school forsakes high paying job at family construction firm for the opportunity to “make a contribution” out west like his admirable great grand father. First day on job discovers evidence of waste, fraud and abuse in dam maintenance program but gets no support from disinterested supervisor. Connects with old flame (Ivy drop out) female minority who has “mad computer skilz” now part of hacking collective devoted to rooting out government black programs. Aided by wise older guy, former Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for NYT (Morgan Freeman?). Team discovers family firm hiding behind six offshore holding companies provides substandard materials and pencil whips inspections and QA reports. Final act exposing family firm and the corrupt public officials takes place on the 7th green at Pebble Beach.

Scenario 2: Maintenance and Safety Managers spend years documenting deferred maintenance and requesting funds to ameliorate same. Politicians ignore same until disaster strikes. Since everyone is responsible, nobody is responsible.

Alterorbis says: • Website
February 12, 2017 at 8:09 pm GMT • 100 Words(Edit-1764787)
Whenever you look at sub Romano-British villas into the 5th to 6th centuries, you generally don’t find evidence of marauding barbarians or pillage. What happens is that if the roof caved in, or tiles were blown off in the wind, no one had the knowledge to repair it and so it was abandoned. Similarly if windows were smashed, glaziers no longer existed, so you had to move out of that room. Great halls where noble families once ate were repurposed as grain stores, or sheds for swine. At some point, a fire breaks out and no one is left who has the expertise to rebuild the house, so it gets abandoned.

Decline is very banal.

SF says:
February 12, 2017 at 9:18 pm GMT • 100 Words(Edit-1764855)
From the close up photos, it looks like there was a softer layer of brown soil upslope from a layer of hard gray and relatively impervious bedrock. My best guess is the ground water accumulated above the bedrock to the point that the soil was semi-liquefied, and eroded from underneath the spillway. This created a void where the spillway was not supported from below, leading to the failure. If this was the case (and I would give it a 51% probability) then it is more a problem with the original design and engineering in the 1960′s.

Steve Sailer says: • Website
February 12, 2017 at 10:41 pm GMT(Edit-1764932)@SF
That’s probably one reason it takes so long to build stuff these days — we know more about what could go wrong so we try to design in safety features for a host of contingencies.

Here’s a blog post I did in 2014 about dams featured in the 1970s movies Chinatown and Earthquake:

One of the odder aspects of modern life is that it takes forever to build infrastructure. For example, the 2.7 mile paved walking path around the beautiful Lake Hollywood reservoir (which is under the famous Hollywood Sign), was washed out in places during the 2005 rains. The loop finally reopened in 2013, over eight years later.

In contrast, the sizable Mulholland Dam that created the Hollywood Reservoir in the 1920s was built in … 1.5 years (according to the bronze plaque on the dam) … it took at least five years less time to build the dam from scratch in the 1920s than to fix the road around the reservoir in the 2000s and 2010s.

On the other hand, as I was reading up on this dam, I saw that William Mulholland, Los Angeles’s titanic chief water engineer, followed up his Hollywood dam with his nearly identical St. Francis dam out in the northern exurbs, which also built in only a couple of years.

Unfortunately, the St. Francis dam collapsed in 1928, killing approximately 600 people. (In Chinatown, the depressed water engineer Hollis Mulwray is vaguely based on Mulholland post-St. Francis dam disaster.)

So, in the 1930s, Los Angeles went back and pushed a huge amount of dirt in front of the Hollywood version of the dam to keep from losing Hollywood. I hadn’t realized how tall the dam is under all the dirt until seeing this photo of the safety project from a 1934 Popular Science:

So, I don’t know. Maybe we have good reasons for doing things more slowly now?

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I wonder how many AA hires there are in that department. Demographically California now resembles a nicer area of Mexico. Sooner or later there will be more pee than punch in the bowl and it’s going to show.

South Park did an episode with the boys going to a water park and it being swamped with minorities, to Cartman's horror. The B-plot consisted of Kyle's digust with with the percentage of pee in the pool.

The two plots converged when the percentage of pee in the pool reached a critical mass and the water park, i guess, "erupted" causing total disaster. Percentage of pee was clearly a metaphor for the percentage of non-Whites in America (but of course I would interpret it that way).

Here's a great song with Cartman asking God to get all the minorities out of his water park:

But we did, apparently, have enough taxpayer money to start giving food stamps to noncitizens, giving cash assistance to aged, blind or disabled noncitizens, as well as free strollers and car seats and bicycle helmets to legal and illegal aliens for their many, many children.

It's a great feeling to know that we paid for our own stroller and groceries AND paid for the stroller and groceries of the often nonworking noncitizens in front of us on line.

…I wonder if the quality of public works engineers has declined as we’ve moved from the construction to the maintenance era. Fifty to 100 years ago, building dams was a highly prestigious profession. Waterworks engineer William Mulholland was perhaps the leading citizen of California and his rise and fall inspired a famous movie…

My great-grandfather was a waterworks civil engineer c.1875-1900. He designed and helped build some medium size dams and waterway systems. His achievement in those days, according to his daughter-in-law, my grandmother, was considered to be equal to that of a cousin of his, who was an appellate court judge. Apparently, people were in awe of what he did at work, back then.

It's still pretty awe-inspiring now. But then sometime in the 1960s, the environmental movement decided dams were evil. As John McPhee observed about environmentalists at the time,

"The outermost circle of the [environmentalists'] Devil’s world seems to be a moat filled mainly with DDT. Next to it is a moat of burning gasoline. Within that is a ring of pinheads each covered with a million people – and so on past phalanxed bulldozers and bicuspid chain saws into the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam. Conservationists who can hold themselves in reasonable check before new oil spills and fresh megalopolises mysteriously go insane at even the thought of a dam."

Of course, a lot of those environmentalists were (and still are) literally living from the water supplied by that western dam and aqueduct system.

I once wondered why it is that there can be droughts in the American Great Plains, when those plains are adjacent to the single biggest supply of fresh water on Earth (the Great Lakes). A bit of googling showed me (as it often does) that I was not the first one to ask this question, and indeed there were even some answers. After finishing the great California water projects, those engineers had gone on to plan perhaps the largest engineering feat in all of human history: a vast network of dams, reservoirs and aqueducts stretching all the way from Canada in the north down to Mexico in the south, from the Great Plains and Lakes in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west.

The retrospective consensus seemed to be that it was never built because it was too expensive, about $30 bil. in the 1920s, if I recall correctly, but even adjusted for inflation, that doesn't seem so much when we're tossing trillions into corrupt banks and pointless wars. And, when repairing one lousy spillway is a nine-figure project, a continent-spanning system that would make the deserts bloom for a (inflation-adjusted) trillion or three seems pretty inexpensive by comparison (not to mention providing jobs other than bankster or war profiteer).

I suspect the real reason it was never built wasn't so much the cost to build it as it was the specter of success: Malthusian force would bring about vast new settlements whose continued existence could be turned on or off at the flip of a hydro-switch. In other words, it was the first and biggest NIMBY victim. There was probably also some consternation about how would poor Mexico pay rich Canada for its water?

But anyway, if it is ever built, it would surely make Civil Engineering Great Again.

My great-grandfather was a waterworks civil engineer c.1875-1900. He designed and helped build some medium size dams and waterway systems. His achievement in those days, according to his daughter-in-law, my grandmother, was considered to be equal to that of a cousin of his, who was an appellate court judge

Maybe there is some equivalency in income, but no way would I rate the accomplishments of a great engineer as similar to an appellate court judge (for someone like Scalia I might make an exception). The judge's decisions don't have to be right. The engineer's decisions are weighed on the scales of the universe's physical law, and if found wanting it will be self-evident with something like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

Aside from not being able to build things, “progressives” can’t foresee the dangers of not maintaining the civilisational relics that made their ascendance possible, which is why hedonistic liberalism is often the last gasp of dying civilisations.

Agree. The SJWs tend to disdain dams, power plants, cars, highways, power lines, corporate farms, and factories. The list goes on and on. However, it seems that they appreciate and partake of the comforts of modern civilization and its infrastructure. They take them for granted.

The SJWs come across as petulant spoiled children who live in superficially sketched, idealized worlds divorced from reality and the common experience of humankind. Like children, they shun a consideration of consequences that they have never had the privilege of experiencing as they press their ill-thought-out projects on humankind.

When things go wrong: "That's not my fault... that's not supposed to happen! Let me throw a tantrum to let everyone know exactly how I feel about this. And I need someone to fix it ... right now!

Immobilized by the Cult of Victimization, I'm doubtful that the Millennial generation has the emotional maturity, the discipline, and the intellectual equipment required to carry Western Civilization to the next generation. They and their immigrant friends are "cashing out" Western Civilization as fast as they can. When it's gone ... it's gone.

We live in California but I say SCREW CALIFORNIA. They hate and look down on Americans in the non coastal states, constantly agitating to take more of our earnings and indoctrinate our children with sick ideas. So let them pay for their own infrastructure, including this dam.

All the supposed big fed tax revenue contributions from Silicon Valley and Hollywood, are dwarfed by the immense financial and social costs that the left inflicts on the rest of us through their support for unending third world immigration into CA and the US.

Trump should direct fed infrastructure spending disproportionately to states that voted for him, or to States that were close and could vote for him next time. Especially Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, the Plains, the Deep South.

Particularly, he should direct funds to the whiter communities, which typically pay a disproportionate share of taxes or suffer a disproportionate share of our military's deaths and injuries, and whose white children are disadvantaged by racial discrimination under the the propaganda name affirmative action.

More broadly, hey Californians, screw you, get lost, and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. You deserve to suffer when your dilapidated dams or bridges collapse because you choose to spend money instead to bring in and subsidize millions of alien peoples to colonize us.

The water spillover is exciting but my ESP says no Orville dam bust in 2017 but if next winter is rainy then maybe yes. I was at lake Oroville a few times a few years back and it was very muddy, shallow and receded very far back. It was an unhappy sight.
With the current Oroville overflow….good luck channeling that much water and making it go the way you want it to go.

There is not a lot of water to go around even in Northern California, and the drought continues at dangerous levels in SoCal and much of the State. There ultimately will be life threatening water shortages and widespread violence as people kill to get water for themselves and their families.

Also, CA will bring in millions more residents because of the generous welfare benefits and "free" healthcare and the weather, without much regard to the availability of good jobs or any jobs. Many people don't come here to work hard but to take advantage, and they're not deterred by a decline in good jobs here.

You are thinking too sensibly. Think like a Californian when analyzing this situation, seriously.

And considering these ten million new people will come straight from the 3rs world quite literally and live ten to an apartment they're going to have even more strain on the environment and natural resources.

Only next time there won't be 15-20 million white Baby Boomers to keep the fuckin trainwreck going.

The average age of a white Californian is late 40s/early 50s. In 20 yrs it's going to be interesting.

I'm shocked at the sheer rapid pace of foreign race replacement in California. Nothing like this has happened since the manifest Destiny era.

With the advent of atomic and quantum physics in 30s-40s, the brightest engineering types went into the fields that became modern physics, electrical engineering, materials science. With the space race, the best and the brightest went into the above and aerospace engineering. For the last 25 years, the best and brightest science and engineering types went into computer science and software engineering.

Getting into the engineering at Cal is prestigious. But the whole college looked at the civ engs as the C students who washed out of all the other engineering majors. Because they were.

And yes, it’s maintenance mode. What exciting new thing is in large scale civ eng? It’s in stuff overseas.

Same reason teachers got dumber. As brightest women went into other fields, teaching (and that usually means work in daycare) is only for the average and below IQ.

With the advent of atomic and quantum physics in 30s-40s, the brightest engineering types went into the fields that became modern physics, electrical engineering, materials science. With the space race, the best and the brightest went into the above and aerospace engineering. For the last 25 years, the best and brightest science and engineering types went into computer science and software engineering.

Actually, for the past 25 years, the best and brightest have gone into finance. There are probably thousands of STEM PhDs wasting their talents hacking the financial system instead of inventing Mars rockets or curing cancer. Picture the water coming down that busted spillway, except imagine that it's money going into the pockets of the big banks.

the whole college looked at the civ engs as the C students who washed out of all the other engineering majors. Because they were.

Environmental engineering is even lower. My employer recently de-funded our one "Energy Sustainability Engineer" when new senior execs realized it was worthless fluff. She had a masters degree in Environmental Engineering from a prestigious east coast university, but she didn't know how to work with spreadsheets.

The Chinese are still building massive dams, and when you think of magnificent public works the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam have to be on your list. I spent 25 years in construction, nothing is better designed and built than a private project, such as a power plant. Government projects are often over designed and wasteful. The occasional appearance of a government engineer or employee, such as an EPA or OSHA inspector, on a private project, was viewed as an intrusion, even the workers had visible distain for them. The one similar feature in most government works , whether it is a dam, a spillway , a lock or a bridge is the lack of meaningful maintenance to ensure the integrity of the structure. No dam, bridge or spillway should fail because it was not inspected correctly and repaired correctly.

Right now there is a big issue on the major bridge over the Delaware River that connects the PA Turnpike with the NJ Turnpike. A big truss member broke clear thru and left a gap of several inches. The load was taken up by other elements so the thing didn't just collapse into the river but it could have gone at any minute since the other elements were now overstressed. They didn't find the crack in a regular inspection - the bridge had just been painted and someone from the NJ Turnpike Authority was inspecting the paint job when he spotted the crack. They can patch the crack but now they have to test all the other elements that may have been overloaded and weakened so the bridge is closed indefinitely until they figure out whether it is safe or not.

Civil engineering is one of the lower paid disciplines of engineering. A starting graduate starts out in the $50-55k range on average and tops out somewhere in the $80-90k range. Meanwhile, there are kids who get offers to make useless apps in Silicon Valley for $90k right out of school. So yeah, most civil engineers aren’t usually the A team anymore or even the B team. Anyone who has enough intelligence to pursue engineering will likely go for the better paying disciplines.

In terms of coursework and course load, civil engineering is generally the easiest major in engineering school. Electrical engineering tends to be the hardest. It's the major to pick to have the easiest time in college and more of a social life, short of switching to lib arts.

It is probably just compensation and propaganda. The government could command respect if it set out to do so. In Texas, the university football coach is the highest paid public employee in the state. The respect he gets is due to the combination of merit, compensation and marketing (propaganda). So, if they jacked up the salaries and the prestige of a zero defects policy and then publicized it and celebrated it, then it would be attractive to the top people.

Before anyone ever does a good job, he first wants to do a good job. To get those who want to do a good job, you have to pay them and reward actual good performance. If Apple and Google could do it, then, so can the state of California, but they would have to want to.

The bottom half of the spillway looks in pretty good shape. The damage started in the middle of the spillway. As more water was released it started eating away at the concrete at the top end of the crater, working towards the top of the spillway. The water also cut out a trench to the right, facing it from the river.

I don’t pretend to understand all the maintenance and repair aspects of the Oroville Dam system. But anytime Californians talk about their water problems, my instinct as a federal taxpayer is to calm down and watch my wallet.

It’s useful to remember that US taxpayers from other states heavily subsidize California water supply. The larger the share of their water costs that Californians must pay, the more likely they are to choose more sensible and efficient solutions. Yes, I know Californians are already stressed about water. They are making sacrifices and bickering with their neighbors about water. But US taxpayers have a right to ask Californians to pay a bigger share.

When Congress enacted the lavish water subsidies in the Reclamation Reform Act of 1902 and related laws, part of the purpose was to encourage more Americans to move to California. Really. California was underpopulated. Back then, it also rained more.

A century later, many billions of US taxpayer dollars have been spent to supply water in California. Where are we today? California is full of people. The climate is drier. There are many water-saving technologies and practices that Californians can learn from places like Australia and Israel — and perfect in the Golden State.

After Californians have exhausted such solutions, it might even be time to consider crazy, radical measures like taking a look at immigration into the state. Curtailing immigration into California wouldn’t solve the whole water problem. But Californians in Congress are asking for billions of US taxpayer dollars to solve their water problems, some on an “emergency” basis.

It’s fair and reasonable for federal taxpayers to ask Californians to get serious about managing not just water supply, but people supply.

A lot of the water problem in California is a people problem. About a year-or-so ago, when California was in the depths of this last drought - the worst ever we are told - the snow-pack in the Sierras was at about the same level as it was in the mid-to-late 70s when California had a notable drought. By the way, Jerry Brown was governor then too. Maybe he's just bad luck. Anyway, the amount of snow in the Sierras wasn't any different than in the 70s. What was different was that the population of the state had increased by 80% since that time.

California also has a power problem; they import about a third of their electricity.

It's getting pretty expensive for the rest of the country to continue to pay for California's exquisite environmental sensibilities.

Bureau of Reclamation has struggled with spillway damage/failure on their dams. At higher flows, turbulence and the resulting cavitation were problems not anticipated by the initial designers. This looks like the issue here.

Maintenance is definitely less glamorous than building, but no less important. I often wonder if the “wizards of build” might leave us with structures too complicated for the coming idiocracy to maintain. I hear rumors that the retiring managers of the electric power grid have no confidence in their replacements to maintain the thing.

Actually, it is not just power grids, our aging nuke and missile systems will become impossible to maintain and rot away eventually. 60-minutes had a program on floppy disk drives in missile silos for programming launches. http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/26/us/pentagon-floppy-disks-nuclear/

DC's Metro system is a good example of governmental incompetence in designing and maintaining infrastructure.

It was kind of ok when it first went into service. The lack of a third track, which makes it a more of an amusement park ride than a real subway, was annoying in how it hobbled the service, but it was tolerable and a reasonably usable system when first constructed.

But over the past 15 years, incompetence in maintenance and operations has more or less destroyed it.

...I wonder if the quality of public works engineers has declined as we’ve moved from the construction to the maintenance era. Fifty to 100 years ago, building dams was a highly prestigious profession. Waterworks engineer William Mulholland was perhaps the leading citizen of California and his rise and fall inspired a famous movie...

My great-grandfather was a waterworks civil engineer c.1875-1900. He designed and helped build some medium size dams and waterway systems. His achievement in those days, according to his daughter-in-law, my grandmother, was considered to be equal to that of a cousin of his, who was an appellate court judge. Apparently, people were in awe of what he did at work, back then.

“Apparently, people were in awe of what he did at work, back then.”

It’s still pretty awe-inspiring now. But then sometime in the 1960s, the environmental movement decided dams were evil. As John McPhee observed about environmentalists at the time,

“The outermost circle of the [environmentalists'] Devil’s world seems to be a moat filled mainly with DDT. Next to it is a moat of burning gasoline. Within that is a ring of pinheads each covered with a million people – and so on past phalanxed bulldozers and bicuspid chain saws into the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam. Conservationists who can hold themselves in reasonable check before new oil spills and fresh megalopolises mysteriously go insane at even the thought of a dam.”

Of course, a lot of those environmentalists were (and still are) literally living from the water supplied by that western dam and aqueduct system.

I once wondered why it is that there can be droughts in the American Great Plains, when those plains are adjacent to the single biggest supply of fresh water on Earth (the Great Lakes). A bit of googling showed me (as it often does) that I was not the first one to ask this question, and indeed there were even some answers. After finishing the great California water projects, those engineers had gone on to plan perhaps the largest engineering feat in all of human history: a vast network of dams, reservoirs and aqueducts stretching all the way from Canada in the north down to Mexico in the south, from the Great Plains and Lakes in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west.

The retrospective consensus seemed to be that it was never built because it was too expensive, about $30 bil. in the 1920s, if I recall correctly, but even adjusted for inflation, that doesn’t seem so much when we’re tossing trillions into corrupt banks and pointless wars. And, when repairing one lousy spillway is a nine-figure project, a continent-spanning system that would make the deserts bloom for a (inflation-adjusted) trillion or three seems pretty inexpensive by comparison (not to mention providing jobs other than bankster or war profiteer).

I suspect the real reason it was never built wasn’t so much the cost to build it as it was the specter of success: Malthusian force would bring about vast new settlements whose continued existence could be turned on or off at the flip of a hydro-switch. In other words, it was the first and biggest NIMBY victim. There was probably also some consternation about how would poor Mexico pay rich Canada for its water?

But anyway, if it is ever built, it would surely make Civil Engineering Great Again.

No, it was never built, as explained in the great 'Cadillac Desert' because environmental legislation would have required Environmental Impact Statements, and since the impacts would be diverse and serious, endless litigation. In addition, no polity is going to let California (or any other State) steal its water in this day and age....

Almost, The US shares the Great Lakes with Canada and the states that touch the lakes and the Canadian government control the use of the water. We, those on the lakes, don't like to and won't share that precious resource.

I believe I read once that in pre-Columbian America, numerous beaver dams had accomplished much the same thing as the vast civic works project you are describing. The Great Plains as we know them today are in part the creation of the numerous fur trappers who laid waste to the beaver population before the area had been widely settled or surveyed. The new ecological balance that resulted was more conducive to the multiplication of the American bison, which swelled in to vast herds that further trampled and desertified the Midwest. That resulted in the Indians having to change their lifestyle to become more intensive hunters of bison, which change they pursued in the grossest manner possible, viz. by setting the prairie ablaze in order to stampede the bison over escarpments so that that they could "clean up" the injured ones, further exacerbating the desertification cycle. It is worth noting in this connection that the Hernando De Soto expedition traveled extensively throughout the American south and southwest in the 1500s and does not record ever having set eyes on a single buffalo.

That article is scary. It's scary at the object level since the Mosul dam failing would be really bad. It's also scary at the meta level. Dam engineers (promoters?) are portrayed as awfully cavalier about water leaking under/around their dams. "We'll just grout it!" Literally---they have been pumping vast quantities of grout into holes which keep forming under the Mosul dam literally every day for decades since it was built.

That Canadian maniac with the cable show about renovating bathrooms so that they don't leak and rot your house's timbers would not be amused.

One lesson is that governments build infrastructure that they believe will be permanent, and often do not build failure contingencies into the design or have a good Plan B if it fails.

Following the adage “two is one, and one is none” the designers of the dam probably should have built two identical concrete spillways, so they could alternate flow while repairing the one not in use. They sort of had a last-ditch backup plan with the “emergency” spillway, but that is not a spillway at all so much as an overflow, and they certainly can’t use that for an extended period of time while repairing the concrete spillway.

(Of course, if the dam broke and took out Sacramento, some people might argue that’s not a bad thing as long as it takes the Legislature with it).

It's still pretty awe-inspiring now. But then sometime in the 1960s, the environmental movement decided dams were evil. As John McPhee observed about environmentalists at the time,

"The outermost circle of the [environmentalists'] Devil’s world seems to be a moat filled mainly with DDT. Next to it is a moat of burning gasoline. Within that is a ring of pinheads each covered with a million people – and so on past phalanxed bulldozers and bicuspid chain saws into the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam. Conservationists who can hold themselves in reasonable check before new oil spills and fresh megalopolises mysteriously go insane at even the thought of a dam."

Of course, a lot of those environmentalists were (and still are) literally living from the water supplied by that western dam and aqueduct system.

I once wondered why it is that there can be droughts in the American Great Plains, when those plains are adjacent to the single biggest supply of fresh water on Earth (the Great Lakes). A bit of googling showed me (as it often does) that I was not the first one to ask this question, and indeed there were even some answers. After finishing the great California water projects, those engineers had gone on to plan perhaps the largest engineering feat in all of human history: a vast network of dams, reservoirs and aqueducts stretching all the way from Canada in the north down to Mexico in the south, from the Great Plains and Lakes in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west.

The retrospective consensus seemed to be that it was never built because it was too expensive, about $30 bil. in the 1920s, if I recall correctly, but even adjusted for inflation, that doesn't seem so much when we're tossing trillions into corrupt banks and pointless wars. And, when repairing one lousy spillway is a nine-figure project, a continent-spanning system that would make the deserts bloom for a (inflation-adjusted) trillion or three seems pretty inexpensive by comparison (not to mention providing jobs other than bankster or war profiteer).

I suspect the real reason it was never built wasn't so much the cost to build it as it was the specter of success: Malthusian force would bring about vast new settlements whose continued existence could be turned on or off at the flip of a hydro-switch. In other words, it was the first and biggest NIMBY victim. There was probably also some consternation about how would poor Mexico pay rich Canada for its water?

But anyway, if it is ever built, it would surely make Civil Engineering Great Again.

I think this is another aspect of your idea that whatever can’t be talked about, won’t be thought about much. I bet in Asia, where shitty jobs are looked down on, the question “what kind of person would possibly want do this” is asked a lot more than here, leading to possibly interesting conclusions about the person or the job or the state of the industry.

Which is of course the reason that we’ve switched to woolly thinking about this subject. Things might be noticed.

It's a solid middle class job, no better than that but no worse. It's no shame if your son becomes a civil engineer, but it ain't a theoretical physicist. Nor an appellate judge. The pay is only OK.

But the red tape is ridiculous. Simple obvious things like "holy moly we'd better repair these things" become complicated and obfuscated and politicized, and as we see nothing gets done, but everyone keeps their jobs. If you actually push too hard to fix things, you'll be scapegoated and out the door. There's no surrender to obvious common sense. That just isn't the way anything is done in California, at least any parts that touches the government or regulated industry.

Is this disaster an inevitable result of third world conditions imposed on former-first world edifices, or is it the true cost of playing Empire, or is it the symbolic fluid wave of the future, or is it simply an affirmation that gravity works?

William Mulholland was not an engineer, and in fact appears to have had no formal education. This was kind of confirmed when the St. Francis Dam, which he designed, failed and killed about 1000 people, somewhat spoiling his reputation….

Just guessing that CalTRANS is more into diversity than competence these days. Which of the two options do their patrons in the Cal legislature care about?

A separate issue is the third party contractors willing to sign on to ill-fated projects if the project is big enough in $$; or if it is abroad from their head office. E.g., the Seattle big dig was always going to be a big risk. E.g., the San Onofre nuclear steam pipes from Mitsubishi – located outside of Japan HQ.

I was just recently discussing this with someone in the civil engineering/environmental engineering business. He was lamenting the fact that finding talent has become very difficult. Even with hiring foreign workers, there’s not enough talent at any price. His firm pays very well so it is not the Silicon Valley grift. He really struggles to find competent people.

The issue as he sees it is three-fold. One is it is not a sexy field. He bluntly pointed out that you don’t see Jews and Asians in the field. They are in tech and the law. Another problem is the schools have made environmental engineering into a girl field. Those with talent want to either start families or go into management. Simply offering a high paying job as an engineer is not enough. The gals want a path to management.

The biggest issue he sees is the younger generation is grossly unprepared for work. Because it takes years for a college grad to mature into a fully functioning adult, the cost of hiring these people is very high, which means most employers prefer someone in their 30′s and they will over pay them. My guess would be that government gets the worst of the worst now as a result.

Excellent point. The Croton Dam in lower Westchester County (NY) is a masonry dam which was constructed in the late 19th-early 20th century (scope out Wiki for further info). It remains alive and well, having been constructed by (if memory serves) Italian immigrant stone cutters. Stone cutting is rapidly becoming a lost art.

My nephew is pursuing a PhD in civil engineering. he wanted to just go to work out of college, but the jobs were being offered to the Master's guys. After interning at a gov't job one summer he said there was no way he'd work for gov't again.
As a kid he loved digging holes and collecting rocks... exactly the sort that is destined to be a civil engineer.

Another friend worked for the bureau of reclamation. All his stories were of fighting with environmentalists in order to get projects going. That and dealing with diversity hires.

What's wrong with people that they can't see that hiring someone who can't do a job is a recipe for failure? It's just nuts.

Your first reason matched the one ientioned in an earlier post, but your third make me think of a bigger generality.

The last two-three decades have had the Nerds win. But more than just nerds, they are Betas.

The kind of man who was a Boy Scout in the 1930s or 50s was a competent, diligent, manly man, who more often that not, was bright. Maybe not brilliant, but bright.

But now that man isn't the engineer. He's not the manager of engineers, even. The engineers are betas, less manly, more hipster, and not capable of the maturity needed to be good either physically or mentally with the responsibility of big scale projects.

Another problem is the schools have made environmental engineering into a girl field. Those with talent want to either start families or go into management. Simply offering a high paying job as an engineer is not enough. The gals want a path to management.

I've seen this in Department of Energy work. The few women in the field end up in management where the men don't want to go. The men would rather do design and research. Management is actually rather looked down upon as boring.

When the dam or levee is completed, it’s not over. Of course to meet safety and performance criteria, the structure should be inspected and maintained for the rest of its working life or until it’s removed. These are not insignificant costs and generally were not considered in benefit-cost considerations when these projects were built. All the big dams are built and there isn’t going to be any North America Water Project (NAWAPA) any time soon. Steve you are right in suggesting that prospective students may not be thrilled about entering a field that mainly is doing maintenance work–dam and levee inspection and maintenance strikes me at least as a bit unglamorous. Maintenance for a lot of water civil works projects is notoriously underfunded. There is all kinds of water infrastructure in the US that is beyond its design life and doesn’t get necessary $$$ for upkeep and upgrades. There aren’t many civil engineers in the US Congress. What congressman every got political payoff by running on a plank of infrastructure maintenance? The fed govt/Army Corps has a lot of aging infrastructure that it doesn’t know what to do with — it’s not as important economically as when it was built, Congress doesn’t provide enough $$$ for maintenance, and the states don’t want it. It’s a big messy problem.

Buck, California's Golden Gate Bridge Commission found $76 million to install suicide catch nets strung from both sides of the bridge. The fact that a jumper sails twenty plus feet into a steel mesh net should lead to some major injuries and probable law suits. I was an ironworker so I just had to walk on that bridge. Good lord it is a magnificent structure and seemingly well maintained by a crew of ironworkers and painters. A member of my local union, since deceased, worked on the erection of the GGB.

Have you noticed that a majority of the visitors to the NY Times and WaPo’s websites are Chinese? And I don’t mean by a little. I’m talking a huge amount.

But if you look at the LA Times, China makes up a tiny portion of their readers.

Something else that’s weird is that both NY Times and WaPo had huge increases in their visitors starting in the fall (which makes sense due to the election) while the LA Times visitors cratered (shouldn’t they get some of that same effect). Visitors also fell off a cliff to USA Today at the same time and USA Today like the LA Times has almost no Chinese readers.

The New York Times has been pursuing an aggressive strategy to reach readers in China. The NYT has had a Chinese-language edition on its website for quite a few years. Now the Chinese government has been blocking the NYT website since October 2012. But recently the NYT has been aggressively using different techniques to get around the "Great Firewall of China" and to get its articles accessible to Chinese readers. And people within China have been using virtual private networks (VPNs) to make an end-run around the censors and gain access to articles in the NYT and elsewhere.

I got to see the Chinese censorship policy firsthand when I was in China about a year ago. Sure enough, there was no NYT. But also, for some reason, all of Unz.com was blocked, including iSteve. So I had to do without my daily iSteve reading for a few weeks. Also no Facebook. And nothing Google - no Google Search, Google Maps or Google Translate.

Part of it could simply that China has the world's largest population connected to the internet, so whatever they happen to look at will inevitably show up red--even if it is only the 38th most poplar site--in Alexa's somewhat misleading map that is based on absolute numbers rather than per capita.

Another possibility is that fake news sites like the NYT are paying for fake subscribers from Chinese click-farms to keep their ad rates up.

Now I’m praying for the whole dam bridge to give way. The entire water system of California was built by corrupt old white men anyway, right? Haven’t they seen the documentary Chinatown? The Mexifornians should have the courage of their convictions and abandon the whole racist-sexist-patriarchal system of dams and aquaducts.

Yes, the new residents should not be burdened with YT's tainted infrastructure. The newcomers need to build it all to their lofty specs; it's the only way to ensure political purity, which is apparently the only thing that matters in this day and age.

Peri, The $1.9 Billion dollar budget shortfall seems, at least to me, to be manageable. Chicago is light $10 billion on their pension funding and Illinois is $100 billion short for their pension payments. Buffalo's Public School budget approaches one billion per year. I think that number is way low.

This could just be a black swan event – the spillway was built to handle the 1,000 year flood and this is the 10,000 year flood instead.

After Katrina, (NO was also built to a 1,000 year flood standard) I found out that the Dutch built to the 10,000 year standard.

It really has nothing to do with waiting 10,000 years, it’s just the risk of the event happening in any given year. Each year the risk is the same whether it’s been 1 year since the last big one or 5,000. Maybe the risk of 10 inches of rain on one day in any given year is 1 in 1,000 but the risk of getting 20 inches is 1/10,000.

It’s all a risk/reward expected value thing. If it costs an extra $1M to build to the higher standard but the risk is 1/10,000 then it’s not worth it unless the expected damages are more than $10 billion.

The Chinese are still building massive dams, and when you think of magnificent public works the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam have to be on your list. I spent 25 years in construction, nothing is better designed and built than a private project, such as a power plant. Government projects are often over designed and wasteful. The occasional appearance of a government engineer or employee, such as an EPA or OSHA inspector, on a private project, was viewed as an intrusion, even the workers had visible distain for them. The one similar feature in most government works , whether it is a dam, a spillway , a lock or a bridge is the lack of meaningful maintenance to ensure the integrity of the structure. No dam, bridge or spillway should fail because it was not inspected correctly and repaired correctly.

Right now there is a big issue on the major bridge over the Delaware River that connects the PA Turnpike with the NJ Turnpike. A big truss member broke clear thru and left a gap of several inches. The load was taken up by other elements so the thing didn’t just collapse into the river but it could have gone at any minute since the other elements were now overstressed. They didn’t find the crack in a regular inspection – the bridge had just been painted and someone from the NJ Turnpike Authority was inspecting the paint job when he spotted the crack. They can patch the crack but now they have to test all the other elements that may have been overloaded and weakened so the bridge is closed indefinitely until they figure out whether it is safe or not.

Jack, I have done work for a local company that drilled new caissons to support new piers to brace that Delaware bridge. I saw photos that showed that the guard rails at the expansion joints (actually a gap in the rail) where the rails were leaning about a foot overboard and no one noticed.

Basic rules of engineering have been codified for decades, and novice or incompetent engineers are almost never hired to do big and important projects. I doubt it was the engineering. Most likely the contractor broke his contract by supplying substandard concrete to save himself some money on the sly. In modern construction, it’s usually a crooked contractor who causes something to start falling apart prematurely, not a dumb engineer.

I certainly think you’re onto something here. The extent of my experience is with residential construction.

It’s very possible to have something built today that will be better suited to its purpose and last longer that what was built 20-50 years ago. How can I justify saying that? Well, there is a broader choice of materials available now, and many of the newer manufactured products are built to higher tolerances. We also know a lot more about which products will be durable as well as techniques/products to avoid. (for example – use techniques/products that minimize/prevent termite issues)

Now, I’d also add that at least 80% of new construction doesn’t come close to maximizing these opportunities. Of course, it’s all about going with the lowest bid up front, then the work being done as cheaply as possible. Anybody that wants better will pay out-the-nose and fight an uphill battle the whole way. I did that for 8 months on the construction of my own home, but now that it’s done, I’m grateful for putting up that fight.

Now I'm praying for the whole dam bridge to give way. The entire water system of California was built by corrupt old white men anyway, right? Haven't they seen the documentary Chinatown? The Mexifornians should have the courage of their convictions and abandon the whole racist-sexist-patriarchal system of dams and aquaducts.

Yes, the new residents should not be burdened with YT’s tainted infrastructure. The newcomers need to build it all to their lofty specs; it’s the only way to ensure political purity, which is apparently the only thing that matters in this day and age.

Now I'm praying for the whole dam bridge to give way. The entire water system of California was built by corrupt old white men anyway, right? Haven't they seen the documentary Chinatown? The Mexifornians should have the courage of their convictions and abandon the whole racist-sexist-patriarchal system of dams and aquaducts.

Apparently the debris from the concrete spillway is blocking the regular outlets from the turbines making the problem worse – that’s ominous because it was not planned for at all. Major tragedies usually happen when more than one thing goes wrong – they did not build the thing with the possibility that the turbine outlets would ever be blocked in mind. The good news is that the emergency spillway seem to be working as planned and it is pretty much idiotproof.

"Major tragedies usually happen when more than one thing goes wrong –"

(My former wife and I were dancing in the rain in Waikiki.)

1) There was a 500 year flood going on in Kailua/Maunawili.

2) The drainage canal that goes past Kaiulana subdivision had not been sufficiently dredged.

THE NEW YEAR'S EVE FLOOD ON OAHU, HAWAII DECEMBER 31, 1987-JANUARY 1, 1988

https://www.nap.edu/read/1748/chapter/6#38

https://www.nap.edu/read/1748/chapter/1

Three hundred homes in my current neighborhood (Coconut Grove) were flooded. Evacuation was done by boat and surfboard.

The water stopped two houses from my present lot. If you dig in Kailua you will find brown sand for one foot. After that it is pure white. The father of my ex-wife was a hydrologist. He refused to live on the Kailua plain.

Pitt, Contractors build according to the Architect's design and the engineer's specs and drawings. They get paid in installments after a certain amount of the project is completed and inspected. Any changes or modifications to the original drawings are paid as a separate item called "Extras". When the project is completed and punched listed ( any work that might not have been done in sequence), the contractor then waits for final payment and the Retention, which is a portion of monies due, usually 5-10% of the bid. Retentions are sometimes held for months if not years while the Architect, engineering firm and Project Manager argue over who owes what to whom. A bank usually holds and releases the money on a large project. In the meantime the contractors have had to make payroll, insurance, material purchases, equipment leases, insurance and fees. All major projects and contractors are performance bonded. These are some of the reasons that contractors frequently declare bankruptcy.

There is a name for what you are proposing - it's called a "lease". But no one would ever lease you a dam under the conditions you are naming.

Say that a dam costs $100 million to build and that the monthly fee (it's called "rent") is $10 million per year. Where is the contractor going to get the $100 million from to build the dam with? No one has $100 million just sitting around. He would have to borrow it from a bank but banks will only lend $ on a lease if the lease has very few outs. They have to be pretty sure that you are going to collect the rent that you are going to use to service their loan. And since facilities like dams last for a long time, you would have to keep raising the rent to keep up with inflation. And you pay rent forever but if the government finances it itself then at some point the bonds are paid off.

The idea that the government would lease stuff instead of buying it is not totally crazy but it would have to be structured to make sense for both sides or no one would bid on it.

Dr. Udge Report has political Grammy Awards as lead story with a big pic of FOREIGNER Adele. I bet close to zero of readers consider the insanity of allowing celeb foreigners to bash and cheap shot our president on our soil on live TV.

But, in the months that followed, American officials inspected the dam and became concerned that it was on the brink of collapse. The problem wasn’t structural: the dam had been built to survive an aerial bombardment. (In fact, during the Gulf War, American jets bombed its generator, but the dam remained intact.) The problem, according to Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi-American civil engineer who has served as an adviser on the dam, is that “it’s just in the wrong place.” Completed in 1984, the dam sits on a foundation of soluble rock. To keep it stable, hundreds of employees have to work around the clock, pumping a cement mixture into the earth below. Without continuous maintenance, the rock beneath would wash away, causing the dam to sink and then break apart. But Iraq’s recent history has not been conducive to that kind of vigilance.

Nature gives a **** and will go medieval on you if you don’t build wisely.

I was just recently discussing this with someone in the civil engineering/environmental engineering business. He was lamenting the fact that finding talent has become very difficult. Even with hiring foreign workers, there's not enough talent at any price. His firm pays very well so it is not the Silicon Valley grift. He really struggles to find competent people.

The issue as he sees it is three-fold. One is it is not a sexy field. He bluntly pointed out that you don't see Jews and Asians in the field. They are in tech and the law. Another problem is the schools have made environmental engineering into a girl field. Those with talent want to either start families or go into management. Simply offering a high paying job as an engineer is not enough. The gals want a path to management.

The biggest issue he sees is the younger generation is grossly unprepared for work. Because it takes years for a college grad to mature into a fully functioning adult, the cost of hiring these people is very high, which means most employers prefer someone in their 30's and they will over pay them. My guess would be that government gets the worst of the worst now as a result.

Excellent point. The Croton Dam in lower Westchester County (NY) is a masonry dam which was constructed in the late 19th-early 20th century (scope out Wiki for further info). It remains alive and well, having been constructed by (if memory serves) Italian immigrant stone cutters. Stone cutting is rapidly becoming a lost art.

Dr. Udge Report has political Grammy Awards as lead story with a big pic of FOREIGNER Adele. I bet close to zero of readers consider the insanity of allowing celeb foreigners to bash and cheap shot our president on our soil on live TV.

But he is such a terrible fascist Nazi dictator that everyone in America is afraid to criticize him, so we have to bring in cheap foreign labor to do it.

In the first decades of the 20th century a tunnel was dug under the Koʻolau Range to bring water from the lush windward to the leeward side of Oahu. It made it possible to grow sugar on the dry Ewa plain.

When I was young we could hike up Waiāhole valley with inner tubes and flashlights and ride the flow under the mountain.

The sugar has been replaced by subdivisions that house people who are supposed to use HART (see rail posting above). There is now a battle over the ownership and use of the water. It is of course couched in environmental language.

Now I'm praying for the whole dam bridge to give way. The entire water system of California was built by corrupt old white men anyway, right? Haven't they seen the documentary Chinatown? The Mexifornians should have the courage of their convictions and abandon the whole racist-sexist-patriarchal system of dams and aquaducts.

Scenario 1: Young newly credentialed engineer from Ivy League school forsakes high paying job at family construction firm for the opportunity to “make a contribution” out west like his admirable great grand father. First day on job discovers evidence of waste, fraud and abuse in dam maintenance program but gets no support from disinterested supervisor. Connects with old flame (Ivy drop out) female minority who has “mad computer skilz” now part of hacking collective devoted to rooting out government black programs. Aided by wise older guy, former Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for NYT (Morgan Freeman?). Team discovers family firm hiding behind six offshore holding companies provides substandard materials and pencil whips inspections and QA reports. Final act exposing family firm and the corrupt public officials takes place on the 7th green at Pebble Beach.

Scenario 2: Maintenance and Safety Managers spend years documenting deferred maintenance and requesting funds to ameliorate same. Politicians ignore same until disaster strikes. Since everyone is responsible, nobody is responsible.

Well stated. Non-engineer politicians kick the maintenance can down the road over, and over, and over, hoping that the catastrophic failure does not happen on their watch. They get pretty much zero points for putting $$$ into maintenance and of course the expenditures can be huge and detract from more visible things being demanded and for which they will get political points. When the SHTF, all the former officials and leaders are long gone. No one politician is going to be blamed and in fact there may be good photo ops to cry, show that they care, and then milk the taxpayer for multi-millions in disaster relief because we are not heartless and it would be wrong to not do so. "What else is government for?" as a liberal friend of mine once asked. They might even milk the taxpayer for huge and questionable post-disaster repairs ($18B for post-Katrina work a good investment? I am sure there were no inflated cost estimates in all contracts and every $$ was accounted for.....in Louisiana.....). It also would be heartless to insist that people who decide to live in risky zones like floodplains have adequate insurance policies.

I wonder how many AA hires there are in that department. Demographically California now resembles a nicer area of Mexico. Sooner or later there will be more pee than punch in the bowl and it's going to show.

Sooner or later?

It’s going to show?

Keep up, Cochise.

I invite anyone doubting that the crumbling infrastructure is a fiat accompli to drive over Altamont Pass.

Scenario 1: Young newly credentialed engineer from Ivy League school forsakes high paying job at family construction firm for the opportunity to "make a contribution" out west like his admirable great grand father. First day on job discovers evidence of waste, fraud and abuse in dam maintenance program but gets no support from disinterested supervisor. Connects with old flame (Ivy drop out) female minority who has "mad computer skilz" now part of hacking collective devoted to rooting out government black programs. Aided by wise older guy, former Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for NYT (Morgan Freeman?). Team discovers family firm hiding behind six offshore holding companies provides substandard materials and pencil whips inspections and QA reports. Final act exposing family firm and the corrupt public officials takes place on the 7th green at Pebble Beach.

Scenario 2: Maintenance and Safety Managers spend years documenting deferred maintenance and requesting funds to ameliorate same. Politicians ignore same until disaster strikes. Since everyone is responsible, nobody is responsible.

“Scenario 2: Maintenance and Safety Managers spend years documenting deferred maintenance and requesting funds to ameliorate same. Politicians ignore same until disaster strikes. Since everyone is responsible, nobody is responsible.”

My father-in-law worked for the Army Corp of Engineers.

He talked about the “deferred maintenance” on the levees above New Orleans that his organization was responsible for. The politicians, state and federal, refused to do anything.

Then in 2005 the flood from Katrina came down the Mississippi, washed away the levees and blacks rioted.

Aside from not being able to build things, "progressives" can't foresee the dangers of not maintaining the civilisational relics that made their ascendance possible, which is why hedonistic liberalism is often the last gasp of dying civilisations.

It ain’t a disaster. Any amount of erosion downhill is unimportant. It’s only a disaster if the erosion starts moving up hill.

This could just be a black swan event - the spillway was built to handle the 1,000 year flood and this is the 10,000 year flood instead.

After Katrina, (NO was also built to a 1,000 year flood standard) I found out that the Dutch built to the 10,000 year standard.

It really has nothing to do with waiting 10,000 years, it's just the risk of the event happening in any given year. Each year the risk is the same whether it's been 1 year since the last big one or 5,000. Maybe the risk of 10 inches of rain on one day in any given year is 1 in 1,000 but the risk of getting 20 inches is 1/10,000.

It's all a risk/reward expected value thing. If it costs an extra $1M to build to the higher standard but the risk is 1/10,000 then it's not worth it unless the expected damages are more than $10 billion.

The little boy has to stand there with his finger plugging the hole in the dyke for 10,000 years?

Dr. Udge Report has political Grammy Awards as lead story with a big pic of FOREIGNER Adele. I bet close to zero of readers consider the insanity of allowing celeb foreigners to bash and cheap shot our president on our soil on live TV.

Readers of this blog, or the general public? It is easy to gloss over since she’s a Brit celebrity.

On a similar note, I did find it extremely jarring to watching Obama scold the UK on Brexit, while standing on their soil and next to the PM.

Apparently the debris from the concrete spillway is blocking the regular outlets from the turbines making the problem worse - that's ominous because it was not planned for at all. Major tragedies usually happen when more than one thing goes wrong - they did not build the thing with the possibility that the turbine outlets would ever be blocked in mind. The good news is that the emergency spillway seem to be working as planned and it is pretty much idiotproof.

“Major tragedies usually happen when more than one thing goes wrong –”

(My former wife and I were dancing in the rain in Waikiki.)

1) There was a 500 year flood going on in Kailua/Maunawili.

2) The drainage canal that goes past Kaiulana subdivision had not been sufficiently dredged.

THE NEW YEAR’S EVE FLOOD ON OAHU, HAWAII DECEMBER 31, 1987-JANUARY 1, 1988

Three hundred homes in my current neighborhood (Coconut Grove) were flooded. Evacuation was done by boat and surfboard.

The water stopped two houses from my present lot. If you dig in Kailua you will find brown sand for one foot. After that it is pure white. The father of my ex-wife was a hydrologist. He refused to live on the Kailua plain.

I wonder how many AA hires there are in that department. Demographically California now resembles a nicer area of Mexico. Sooner or later there will be more pee than punch in the bowl and it's going to show.

South Park did an episode with the boys going to a water park and it being swamped with minorities, to Cartman’s horror. The B-plot consisted of Kyle’s digust with with the percentage of pee in the pool.

The two plots converged when the percentage of pee in the pool reached a critical mass and the water park, i guess, “erupted” causing total disaster. Percentage of pee was clearly a metaphor for the percentage of non-Whites in America (but of course I would interpret it that way).

Here’s a great song with Cartman asking God to get all the minorities out of his water park:

...I wonder if the quality of public works engineers has declined as we’ve moved from the construction to the maintenance era. Fifty to 100 years ago, building dams was a highly prestigious profession. Waterworks engineer William Mulholland was perhaps the leading citizen of California and his rise and fall inspired a famous movie...

My great-grandfather was a waterworks civil engineer c.1875-1900. He designed and helped build some medium size dams and waterway systems. His achievement in those days, according to his daughter-in-law, my grandmother, was considered to be equal to that of a cousin of his, who was an appellate court judge. Apparently, people were in awe of what he did at work, back then.

“His achievement in those days, according to his daughter-in-law, my grandmother, was considered to be equal to that of a cousin of his, who was an appellate court judge.”

His achievement was much greater. Judges are mere transient functionaries of the state.

Yale University will rename Calhoun College, originally named for a virulent white supremacist and vocal advocate of slavery, as Hopper College. The new name will honor Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, a founding mind of computer science who invented the first compiler, worked on the Mark I computer at Harvard, and served as a technical consultant in the development of the COBOL language. Admiral Hopper already has a supercomputer and a Navy guided-missile destroyer named after her.

The controversy over Calhoun College’s name and legacy has been ongoing. In 1992, student Chris Rabb petitioned for the removal of a racist stained glass window in the College, which depicted a chained slave kneeling at the feet of Calhoun. In 2015 and 2016, in the wake of the horrific Charleston church shooting, students mobilized to demand a name change, but Yale announced they would be keeping the name in April of 2016. Then, in July of 2016, dining hall worker Corey Menafee smashed a different stained glass window, depicting slaves picking cotton.

Some activists cite Menafee as the reason for the administration’s about-face; others cite the current political climate and ongoing student advocacy for a more inclusive campus. Whatever the reason, as of July, Calhoun College will instead honor Grace Hopper.

student Chris Rabb petitioned for the removal of a racist stained glass window

Remove racist stained glass from premises!

This is a nice college though. Beautiful courtyard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calhoun_College)

Also:

The courtyard used to have a popular tire swing, which stood in stark contrast to the stunning Neo-Gothic architecture. In the Fall of 1990, newly appointed master Turan Onat made it his first priority to remove the tire swing as he sought "to restore the courtyard to a grassier state." The seniors immediately reinstalled the swing overnight and Onat quickly reversed his policy.

Hopefully nobody will associate the tires and the swinging rope with racism or the swing will be out again.

In 1957, a Senate Committee headed by Senator John F. Kennedy selected Calhoun as one of the five greatest United States Senators of all time

Calhoun did many things besides advocating for the traditions of his day, but this gets lost in the current debate. By the way his opponents talk, you would think he came to work one day and decided to start the institution of slavery just to piss people off.

Even in the best of times, infrastructure isn’t sexy and doesn’t attract much in the way of funding or attention compared to say protecting illegals, high speed trains and promoting sexual deviancy. It’s not surprising in the least that’s treated politically and funding wise as the red headed step child.

We should consider ourselves lucky that the old school Democrats placed so much emphasis on public works and putting people back to work. At least we got something for our money. Imagine what the country would have looked like if today’s Democrats were running the shop back then. They’re would be no public works, roads, schools, etc. Just hand outs to perverts, feminazis and moochers.

I was just recently discussing this with someone in the civil engineering/environmental engineering business. He was lamenting the fact that finding talent has become very difficult. Even with hiring foreign workers, there's not enough talent at any price. His firm pays very well so it is not the Silicon Valley grift. He really struggles to find competent people.

The issue as he sees it is three-fold. One is it is not a sexy field. He bluntly pointed out that you don't see Jews and Asians in the field. They are in tech and the law. Another problem is the schools have made environmental engineering into a girl field. Those with talent want to either start families or go into management. Simply offering a high paying job as an engineer is not enough. The gals want a path to management.

The biggest issue he sees is the younger generation is grossly unprepared for work. Because it takes years for a college grad to mature into a fully functioning adult, the cost of hiring these people is very high, which means most employers prefer someone in their 30's and they will over pay them. My guess would be that government gets the worst of the worst now as a result.

“The issue as he sees it is three-fold. One is it is not a sexy field. He bluntly pointed out that you don’t see Jews and Asians in the field.”

You didn’t see them much 50-70 years ago either, when most of that infrastructure was first built. But thanks for the patronizing anti-white racial-supremecy.

As I noted the other day, Jews do not build civilizations. They let whites do the grunt work and then grab their lucrative little niche, skimming all the cream off the top.

Steve, this is (somewhat) OT, but have you heard about the (white female) United Airlines pilot who showed up for a flight wearing street clothes and started ranting over the intercom?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4216218/United-Airlines-pilot-removed-flight-rant.html

(It is somewhat relevant, given the fact that, "back in the day," boring pale male airline pilots tended not to have hormonal freakouts while on the job.)

Aside from not being able to build things, "progressives" can't foresee the dangers of not maintaining the civilisational relics that made their ascendance possible, which is why hedonistic liberalism is often the last gasp of dying civilisations.

Maintenance is boring…only conservatives would do something like that….

Dr. Udge Report has political Grammy Awards as lead story with a big pic of FOREIGNER Adele. I bet close to zero of readers consider the insanity of allowing celeb foreigners to bash and cheap shot our president on our soil on live TV.

Not really familiar w this ‘Adele’ person but I did see that over @ Drudge. I concluded that any picture that contains all of Adele is de facto a big one.

Yale University will rename Calhoun College, originally named for a virulent white supremacist and vocal advocate of slavery, as Hopper College. The new name will honor Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, a founding mind of computer science who invented the first compiler, worked on the Mark I computer at Harvard, and served as a technical consultant in the development of the COBOL language. Admiral Hopper already has a supercomputer and a Navy guided-missile destroyer named after her.

The controversy over Calhoun College’s name and legacy has been ongoing. In 1992, student Chris Rabb petitioned for the removal of a racist stained glass window in the College, which depicted a chained slave kneeling at the feet of Calhoun. In 2015 and 2016, in the wake of the horrific Charleston church shooting, students mobilized to demand a name change, but Yale announced they would be keeping the name in April of 2016. Then, in July of 2016, dining hall worker Corey Menafee smashed a different stained glass window, depicting slaves picking cotton.

Some activists cite Menafee as the reason for the administration’s about-face; others cite the current political climate and ongoing student advocacy for a more inclusive campus. Whatever the reason, as of July, Calhoun College will instead honor Grace Hopper.

http://www.themarysue.com/yale-renames-calhoun-hopper/

student Chris Rabb petitioned for the removal of a racist stained glass window

The courtyard used to have a popular tire swing, which stood in stark contrast to the stunning Neo-Gothic architecture. In the Fall of 1990, newly appointed master Turan Onat made it his first priority to remove the tire swing as he sought “to restore the courtyard to a grassier state.” The seniors immediately reinstalled the swing overnight and Onat quickly reversed his policy.

Hopefully nobody will associate the tires and the swinging rope with racism or the swing will be out again.

Yale University will rename Calhoun College, originally named for a virulent white supremacist and vocal advocate of slavery, as Hopper College. The new name will honor Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, a founding mind of computer science who invented the first compiler, worked on the Mark I computer at Harvard, and served as a technical consultant in the development of the COBOL language. Admiral Hopper already has a supercomputer and a Navy guided-missile destroyer named after her.

The controversy over Calhoun College’s name and legacy has been ongoing. In 1992, student Chris Rabb petitioned for the removal of a racist stained glass window in the College, which depicted a chained slave kneeling at the feet of Calhoun. In 2015 and 2016, in the wake of the horrific Charleston church shooting, students mobilized to demand a name change, but Yale announced they would be keeping the name in April of 2016. Then, in July of 2016, dining hall worker Corey Menafee smashed a different stained glass window, depicting slaves picking cotton.

Some activists cite Menafee as the reason for the administration’s about-face; others cite the current political climate and ongoing student advocacy for a more inclusive campus. Whatever the reason, as of July, Calhoun College will instead honor Grace Hopper.

http://www.themarysue.com/yale-renames-calhoun-hopper/

Let ‘em change it: Yale is no longer worthy to bear John C. Calhoun’s name anywhere on campus.

Scenario 1: Young newly credentialed engineer from Ivy League school forsakes high paying job at family construction firm for the opportunity to "make a contribution" out west like his admirable great grand father. First day on job discovers evidence of waste, fraud and abuse in dam maintenance program but gets no support from disinterested supervisor. Connects with old flame (Ivy drop out) female minority who has "mad computer skilz" now part of hacking collective devoted to rooting out government black programs. Aided by wise older guy, former Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for NYT (Morgan Freeman?). Team discovers family firm hiding behind six offshore holding companies provides substandard materials and pencil whips inspections and QA reports. Final act exposing family firm and the corrupt public officials takes place on the 7th green at Pebble Beach.

Scenario 2: Maintenance and Safety Managers spend years documenting deferred maintenance and requesting funds to ameliorate same. Politicians ignore same until disaster strikes. Since everyone is responsible, nobody is responsible.

Well stated. Non-engineer politicians kick the maintenance can down the road over, and over, and over, hoping that the catastrophic failure does not happen on their watch. They get pretty much zero points for putting $$$ into maintenance and of course the expenditures can be huge and detract from more visible things being demanded and for which they will get political points. When the SHTF, all the former officials and leaders are long gone. No one politician is going to be blamed and in fact there may be good photo ops to cry, show that they care, and then milk the taxpayer for multi-millions in disaster relief because we are not heartless and it would be wrong to not do so. “What else is government for?” as a liberal friend of mine once asked. They might even milk the taxpayer for huge and questionable post-disaster repairs ($18B for post-Katrina work a good investment? I am sure there were no inflated cost estimates in all contracts and every $$ was accounted for…..in Louisiana…..). It also would be heartless to insist that people who decide to live in risky zones like floodplains have adequate insurance policies.

politicians kick the maintenance can down the road over, and over, and over, hoping that the catastrophic failure does not happen on their watch...When the SHTF, all the former officials and leaders are long gone.

Just like golf-plated six-figure lifetime pensions for cops, firefighters, and jail guards.

With the advent of atomic and quantum physics in 30s-40s, the brightest engineering types went into the fields that became modern physics, electrical engineering, materials science. With the space race, the best and the brightest went into the above and aerospace engineering. For the last 25 years, the best and brightest science and engineering types went into computer science and software engineering.

Getting into the engineering at Cal is prestigious. But the whole college looked at the civ engs as the C students who washed out of all the other engineering majors. Because they were.

And yes, it's maintenance mode. What exciting new thing is in large scale civ eng? It's in stuff overseas.

Same reason teachers got dumber. As brightest women went into other fields, teaching (and that usually means work in daycare) is only for the average and below IQ.

With the advent of atomic and quantum physics in 30s-40s, the brightest engineering types went into the fields that became modern physics, electrical engineering, materials science. With the space race, the best and the brightest went into the above and aerospace engineering. For the last 25 years, the best and brightest science and engineering types went into computer science and software engineering.

Actually, for the past 25 years, the best and brightest have gone into finance. There are probably thousands of STEM PhDs wasting their talents hacking the financial system instead of inventing Mars rockets or curing cancer. Picture the water coming down that busted spillway, except imagine that it’s money going into the pockets of the big banks.

Actually, for the past 25 years, the best and brightest have gone into finance. There are probably thousands of STEM PhDs wasting their talents hacking the financial system instead of inventing Mars rockets or curing cancer. Picture the water coming down that busted spillway, except imagine that it’s money going into the pockets of the big banks.

The busted banks, manned and guided by the best and the brightest, then bailed out by the common tax payer.

Apparently the debris from the concrete spillway is blocking the regular outlets from the turbines making the problem worse - that's ominous because it was not planned for at all. Major tragedies usually happen when more than one thing goes wrong - they did not build the thing with the possibility that the turbine outlets would ever be blocked in mind. The good news is that the emergency spillway seem to be working as planned and it is pretty much idiotproof.

Fukushima-with-water sure will propel “green energy”.

Why is the spillway so straight & narrow though? One would like to think there would be water brakes in the middle to get rid of the unleashed potential energy of the falling water masses.

I'm not a hydraulic engineer but I assume anything that would slow the water down would also tend to cause it to back up - in order to maximize the capacity of the spillway you want to make it as straight and smooth as possible.

Why is the spillway so straight & narrow though? One would like to think there would be water brakes in the middle to get rid of the unleashed potential energy of the falling water masses.

Quite the reverse. Any "braking" you put into the spillway generates force on the spillway. Completely smooth "frictionless"--the old non-physical physics problem standard--flow and you could make it out of sheet plastic. Start putting in "braking"--i.e. friction--and the more it needs to be hard and firmly attached to the bedrock. The more costly and the more prone to failure.

It's still pretty awe-inspiring now. But then sometime in the 1960s, the environmental movement decided dams were evil. As John McPhee observed about environmentalists at the time,

"The outermost circle of the [environmentalists'] Devil’s world seems to be a moat filled mainly with DDT. Next to it is a moat of burning gasoline. Within that is a ring of pinheads each covered with a million people – and so on past phalanxed bulldozers and bicuspid chain saws into the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam. Conservationists who can hold themselves in reasonable check before new oil spills and fresh megalopolises mysteriously go insane at even the thought of a dam."

Of course, a lot of those environmentalists were (and still are) literally living from the water supplied by that western dam and aqueduct system.

I once wondered why it is that there can be droughts in the American Great Plains, when those plains are adjacent to the single biggest supply of fresh water on Earth (the Great Lakes). A bit of googling showed me (as it often does) that I was not the first one to ask this question, and indeed there were even some answers. After finishing the great California water projects, those engineers had gone on to plan perhaps the largest engineering feat in all of human history: a vast network of dams, reservoirs and aqueducts stretching all the way from Canada in the north down to Mexico in the south, from the Great Plains and Lakes in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west.

The retrospective consensus seemed to be that it was never built because it was too expensive, about $30 bil. in the 1920s, if I recall correctly, but even adjusted for inflation, that doesn't seem so much when we're tossing trillions into corrupt banks and pointless wars. And, when repairing one lousy spillway is a nine-figure project, a continent-spanning system that would make the deserts bloom for a (inflation-adjusted) trillion or three seems pretty inexpensive by comparison (not to mention providing jobs other than bankster or war profiteer).

I suspect the real reason it was never built wasn't so much the cost to build it as it was the specter of success: Malthusian force would bring about vast new settlements whose continued existence could be turned on or off at the flip of a hydro-switch. In other words, it was the first and biggest NIMBY victim. There was probably also some consternation about how would poor Mexico pay rich Canada for its water?

But anyway, if it is ever built, it would surely make Civil Engineering Great Again.

No, it was never built, as explained in the great ‘Cadillac Desert’ because environmental legislation would have required Environmental Impact Statements, and since the impacts would be diverse and serious, endless litigation. In addition, no polity is going to let California (or any other State) steal its water in this day and age….

Have you noticed that a majority of the visitors to the NY Times and WaPo's websites are Chinese? And I don't mean by a little. I'm talking a huge amount.

But if you look at the LA Times, China makes up a tiny portion of their readers.

Something else that's weird is that both NY Times and WaPo had huge increases in their visitors starting in the fall (which makes sense due to the election) while the LA Times visitors cratered (shouldn't they get some of that same effect). Visitors also fell off a cliff to USA Today at the same time and USA Today like the LA Times has almost no Chinese readers.

What's going on?

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/nytimes.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/washingtonpost.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/usatoday.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/latimes.com

That’s very interesting. Are the “visits” hacking attempts? An army of troll commenters paid to pick through every story? Or just some kind of fluke with the way visits are counted?

Whenever you look at sub Romano-British villas into the 5th to 6th centuries, you generally don’t find evidence of marauding barbarians or pillage. What happens is that if the roof caved in, or tiles were blown off in the wind, no one had the knowledge to repair it and so it was abandoned. Similarly if windows were smashed, glaziers no longer existed, so you had to move out of that room. Great halls where noble families once ate were repurposed as grain stores, or sheds for swine. At some point, a fire breaks out and no one is left who has the expertise to rebuild the house, so it gets abandoned.

Bureau of Reclamation has struggled with spillway damage/failure on their dams. At higher flows, turbulence and the resulting cavitation were problems not anticipated by the initial designers. This looks like the issue here.

Maintenance is definitely less glamorous than building, but no less important. I often wonder if the "wizards of build" might leave us with structures too complicated for the coming idiocracy to maintain. I hear rumors that the retiring managers of the electric power grid have no confidence in their replacements to maintain the thing.

“The cracks and damage were well known, but there was no money to fix them.”

I’m here to tell you that the pothole problem in Silicon Valley, due to all the recent rain, became extreme nearly overnight. Lots of tires being wiped out. I went by one large pot-hole a few weeks ago that had 5 cars off to the side with flats. I had 2 tires shot, not from any one big pothole, but just lots of long unavoidable ruts of small potholes. They really should pay me to drive on roads that are physically this bad.

I’ve heard that water damage might be more expensive to fix than the results of the big Loma Prieta quake.

California is way behind on its basic physical infrastructure.

Meanwhile, California politics is no doubt concentrating on sanctuary cities and ways around US immigration laws. And, oh, yeah, high speed rail that will move lots of immigrants cheaply north into California real estate developers projects.

It's still pretty awe-inspiring now. But then sometime in the 1960s, the environmental movement decided dams were evil. As John McPhee observed about environmentalists at the time,

"The outermost circle of the [environmentalists'] Devil’s world seems to be a moat filled mainly with DDT. Next to it is a moat of burning gasoline. Within that is a ring of pinheads each covered with a million people – and so on past phalanxed bulldozers and bicuspid chain saws into the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam. Conservationists who can hold themselves in reasonable check before new oil spills and fresh megalopolises mysteriously go insane at even the thought of a dam."

Of course, a lot of those environmentalists were (and still are) literally living from the water supplied by that western dam and aqueduct system.

I once wondered why it is that there can be droughts in the American Great Plains, when those plains are adjacent to the single biggest supply of fresh water on Earth (the Great Lakes). A bit of googling showed me (as it often does) that I was not the first one to ask this question, and indeed there were even some answers. After finishing the great California water projects, those engineers had gone on to plan perhaps the largest engineering feat in all of human history: a vast network of dams, reservoirs and aqueducts stretching all the way from Canada in the north down to Mexico in the south, from the Great Plains and Lakes in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west.

The retrospective consensus seemed to be that it was never built because it was too expensive, about $30 bil. in the 1920s, if I recall correctly, but even adjusted for inflation, that doesn't seem so much when we're tossing trillions into corrupt banks and pointless wars. And, when repairing one lousy spillway is a nine-figure project, a continent-spanning system that would make the deserts bloom for a (inflation-adjusted) trillion or three seems pretty inexpensive by comparison (not to mention providing jobs other than bankster or war profiteer).

I suspect the real reason it was never built wasn't so much the cost to build it as it was the specter of success: Malthusian force would bring about vast new settlements whose continued existence could be turned on or off at the flip of a hydro-switch. In other words, it was the first and biggest NIMBY victim. There was probably also some consternation about how would poor Mexico pay rich Canada for its water?

But anyway, if it is ever built, it would surely make Civil Engineering Great Again.

Almost, The US shares the Great Lakes with Canada and the states that touch the lakes and the Canadian government control the use of the water. We, those on the lakes, don’t like to and won’t share that precious resource.

I don't pretend to understand all the maintenance and repair aspects of the Oroville Dam system. But anytime Californians talk about their water problems, my instinct as a federal taxpayer is to calm down and watch my wallet.

It's useful to remember that US taxpayers from other states heavily subsidize California water supply. The larger the share of their water costs that Californians must pay, the more likely they are to choose more sensible and efficient solutions. Yes, I know Californians are already stressed about water. They are making sacrifices and bickering with their neighbors about water. But US taxpayers have a right to ask Californians to pay a bigger share.

When Congress enacted the lavish water subsidies in the Reclamation Reform Act of 1902 and related laws, part of the purpose was to encourage more Americans to move to California. Really. California was underpopulated. Back then, it also rained more.

A century later, many billions of US taxpayer dollars have been spent to supply water in California. Where are we today? California is full of people. The climate is drier. There are many water-saving technologies and practices that Californians can learn from places like Australia and Israel -- and perfect in the Golden State.

After Californians have exhausted such solutions, it might even be time to consider crazy, radical measures like taking a look at immigration into the state. Curtailing immigration into California wouldn't solve the whole water problem. But Californians in Congress are asking for billions of US taxpayer dollars to solve their water problems, some on an "emergency" basis.

It's fair and reasonable for federal taxpayers to ask Californians to get serious about managing not just water supply, but people supply.

A lot of the water problem in California is a people problem. About a year-or-so ago, when California was in the depths of this last drought – the worst ever we are told – the snow-pack in the Sierras was at about the same level as it was in the mid-to-late 70s when California had a notable drought. By the way, Jerry Brown was governor then too. Maybe he’s just bad luck. Anyway, the amount of snow in the Sierras wasn’t any different than in the 70s. What was different was that the population of the state had increased by 80% since that time.

California also has a power problem; they import about a third of their electricity.

It’s getting pretty expensive for the rest of the country to continue to pay for California’s exquisite environmental sensibilities.

When the dam or levee is completed, it's not over. Of course to meet safety and performance criteria, the structure should be inspected and maintained for the rest of its working life or until it's removed. These are not insignificant costs and generally were not considered in benefit-cost considerations when these projects were built. All the big dams are built and there isn't going to be any North America Water Project (NAWAPA) any time soon. Steve you are right in suggesting that prospective students may not be thrilled about entering a field that mainly is doing maintenance work--dam and levee inspection and maintenance strikes me at least as a bit unglamorous. Maintenance for a lot of water civil works projects is notoriously underfunded. There is all kinds of water infrastructure in the US that is beyond its design life and doesn't get necessary $$$ for upkeep and upgrades. There aren't many civil engineers in the US Congress. What congressman every got political payoff by running on a plank of infrastructure maintenance? The fed govt/Army Corps has a lot of aging infrastructure that it doesn't know what to do with -- it's not as important economically as when it was built, Congress doesn't provide enough $$$ for maintenance, and the states don't want it. It's a big messy problem.

Buck, California’s Golden Gate Bridge Commission found $76 million to install suicide catch nets strung from both sides of the bridge. The fact that a jumper sails twenty plus feet into a steel mesh net should lead to some major injuries and probable law suits. I was an ironworker so I just had to walk on that bridge. Good lord it is a magnificent structure and seemingly well maintained by a crew of ironworkers and painters. A member of my local union, since deceased, worked on the erection of the GGB.

The thing I can't understand about the Golden Gate Bridge suicides is why anyone would jump into the water. On the Marin approach there's a 100-foot drop onto bare gravel that can be accessed by climbing over a very modest railing. I don't get why anyone would pass that by, saying, "no, I'd rather jump from midspan, where I might well break multiple bones hitting the frigid water, then remain conscious while drowning." But I guess when you get to that point in life, you're not thinking straight at all.

seemingly kept in good repair.... It is not. Before they approved the ridiculous suicide catcher... which of course will cost more than 76 million and yes likely do extensive damage... it came out the bridge is in terrible repair. IN particular the South Tower. Parts of it have never been repaired in all the years.

I come from the generation that was raised, told, that the GGB was never not being repaired and painted. The work went from one end to the other, and then egan again...

Absolutely appalling. And if I never hear from another whining relative of a GGB suicide it will be too soon.

He spoke too loudly and lacked the slickness of a lot of the guests. It probably would be better if he does future appearances in person rather than talking head uplink. It was also excessively tense, a little more charm and a joke or two would have diffused this. A good moment to be less serious was the mention of the stupid fake scandal about Kelleyanne Conway breaking some rule by “promoting” Ivanka’s clothing line.

“I am no fashion expert George, but even I can tell both Kelleyanne and Ivanka have great taste and it isn’t illegal to say so. This is just the liberal media trying to create a fake scandal against two very intelligent and talented women who have been working tirelessly this past year with the President to make America great again.”

On the positive side, he hammered the key points about illegal voting and illegal crime under hostile questioning. The most effective single line was probably that there are a million illegals with judicial branch issued orders of deportation, and it is the left that does not respect our judicial system.

I rather like the fact that Miller wasn't chummy with that Clinton hack. Staphyloccolous isn't David Brinkley - he's not a real journalist - he's a Democratic party operative. I think there's been all too much congeneality on the part of the Republicans. I like seeing them get a little hostile for a change. Stephen Miller is a smart guy,......on target, and on our side. The Democrats never act particularly nice, and it mostly seems to work for them.

“Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned,” said Stephen Miller, Mr Trump’s senior policy director.

It would have been better to say "will prevail", but there is no sense in apologizing to the left. Fash on, Miller!

Not only does CA have a $1.9B budget shortfall, it now needs to find money and people to repair that damage.

We need to ask Mexico to really send us their best, because the ones they have sent so far are just not making the grade and we can't find Americans to do the work! </sarc>

Peri, The $1.9 Billion dollar budget shortfall seems, at least to me, to be manageable. Chicago is light $10 billion on their pension funding and Illinois is $100 billion short for their pension payments. Buffalo’s Public School budget approaches one billion per year. I think that number is way low.

Right now there is a big issue on the major bridge over the Delaware River that connects the PA Turnpike with the NJ Turnpike. A big truss member broke clear thru and left a gap of several inches. The load was taken up by other elements so the thing didn't just collapse into the river but it could have gone at any minute since the other elements were now overstressed. They didn't find the crack in a regular inspection - the bridge had just been painted and someone from the NJ Turnpike Authority was inspecting the paint job when he spotted the crack. They can patch the crack but now they have to test all the other elements that may have been overloaded and weakened so the bridge is closed indefinitely until they figure out whether it is safe or not.

Jack, I have done work for a local company that drilled new caissons to support new piers to brace that Delaware bridge. I saw photos that showed that the guard rails at the expansion joints (actually a gap in the rail) where the rails were leaning about a foot overboard and no one noticed.

They attributed the crack to "weather" so far. It does not appear from the photo that there was any corrosion at the point of failure - it's shiny metal. My theory is that the expansion joints seized up and put the bridge under tension during a cold snap. The bridge is over a mile long and it shrinks considerably on a cold day. If it can't slide in the expansion joint then it will snap at the weakest point like a rubber band.

The cracks and damage were well known, but there was no money to fix them.

But we did, apparently, have enough taxpayer money to start giving food stamps to noncitizens, giving cash assistance to aged, blind or disabled noncitizens, as well as free strollers and car seats and bicycle helmets to legal and illegal aliens for their many, many children.

It’s a great feeling to know that we paid for our own stroller and groceries AND paid for the stroller and groceries of the often nonworking noncitizens in front of us on line.

...I wonder if the quality of public works engineers has declined as we’ve moved from the construction to the maintenance era. Fifty to 100 years ago, building dams was a highly prestigious profession. Waterworks engineer William Mulholland was perhaps the leading citizen of California and his rise and fall inspired a famous movie...

My great-grandfather was a waterworks civil engineer c.1875-1900. He designed and helped build some medium size dams and waterway systems. His achievement in those days, according to his daughter-in-law, my grandmother, was considered to be equal to that of a cousin of his, who was an appellate court judge. Apparently, people were in awe of what he did at work, back then.

What your great grandfather did was far more socially valuable and admirable and useful than the typical judge.

Basic rules of engineering have been codified for decades, and novice or incompetent engineers are almost never hired to do big and important projects. I doubt it was the engineering. Most likely the contractor broke his contract by supplying substandard concrete to save himself some money on the sly. In modern construction, it's usually a crooked contractor who causes something to start falling apart prematurely, not a dumb engineer.

Anon, I have to agree. I more often than not, saw structural and rebar members that are way over engineered.

Buck, California's Golden Gate Bridge Commission found $76 million to install suicide catch nets strung from both sides of the bridge. The fact that a jumper sails twenty plus feet into a steel mesh net should lead to some major injuries and probable law suits. I was an ironworker so I just had to walk on that bridge. Good lord it is a magnificent structure and seemingly well maintained by a crew of ironworkers and painters. A member of my local union, since deceased, worked on the erection of the GGB.

The thing I can’t understand about the Golden Gate Bridge suicides is why anyone would jump into the water. On the Marin approach there’s a 100-foot drop onto bare gravel that can be accessed by climbing over a very modest railing. I don’t get why anyone would pass that by, saying, “no, I’d rather jump from midspan, where I might well break multiple bones hitting the frigid water, then remain conscious while drowning.” But I guess when you get to that point in life, you’re not thinking straight at all.

Faraday, I think there is something mesmerizing about water, lots of suicides at Niagara Falls where people climb a railing, drift by and are swept over the Falls to be pounded by tons of water. But your last line says it all.

Yes, the new residents should not be burdened with YT's tainted infrastructure. The newcomers need to build it all to their lofty specs; it's the only way to ensure political purity, which is apparently the only thing that matters in this day and age.

bomag, Africa has worn out most of the infrastructure that the Colonists left them. The Chinese have stepped in to start over. Of course in a few years the Chinese will be the new Colonists in Africa.

Hmmm a giant expensive contruction project,hey!California we just elected a president who's great at that sort of thing , so be a little nicer .

We live in California but I say SCREW CALIFORNIA. They hate and look down on Americans in the non coastal states, constantly agitating to take more of our earnings and indoctrinate our children with sick ideas. So let them pay for their own infrastructure, including this dam.

All the supposed big fed tax revenue contributions from Silicon Valley and Hollywood, are dwarfed by the immense financial and social costs that the left inflicts on the rest of us through their support for unending third world immigration into CA and the US.

Trump should direct fed infrastructure spending disproportionately to states that voted for him, or to States that were close and could vote for him next time. Especially Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, the Plains, the Deep South.

Particularly, he should direct funds to the whiter communities, which typically pay a disproportionate share of taxes or suffer a disproportionate share of our military’s deaths and injuries, and whose white children are disadvantaged by racial discrimination under the the propaganda name affirmative action.

More broadly, hey Californians, screw you, get lost, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. You deserve to suffer when your dilapidated dams or bridges collapse because you choose to spend money instead to bring in and subsidize millions of alien peoples to colonize us.

Civil Engineering is still a respectable job with smart people in it, but they constantly get jerked around by contracts that are awarded based on graft. Most jobs are reduced to maintenance.

A lot of more ambitious engineers end up going to the middle east, where the Kings/Princes are throwing around billions of dollars to build world class infrastructure for there whole country in a few years, and of course contract out western engineering companies to design it for them.

I think a much bigger problem and impact is that California, with a lot of water to go around, will boom economically, and will bring in another 10 million residents.

There is not a lot of water to go around even in Northern California, and the drought continues at dangerous levels in SoCal and much of the State. There ultimately will be life threatening water shortages and widespread violence as people kill to get water for themselves and their families.

Also, CA will bring in millions more residents because of the generous welfare benefits and “free” healthcare and the weather, without much regard to the availability of good jobs or any jobs. Many people don’t come here to work hard but to take advantage, and they’re not deterred by a decline in good jobs here.

You are thinking too sensibly. Think like a Californian when analyzing this situation, seriously.

Yale University will rename Calhoun College, originally named for a virulent white supremacist and vocal advocate of slavery, as Hopper College. The new name will honor Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, a founding mind of computer science who invented the first compiler, worked on the Mark I computer at Harvard, and served as a technical consultant in the development of the COBOL language. Admiral Hopper already has a supercomputer and a Navy guided-missile destroyer named after her.

The controversy over Calhoun College’s name and legacy has been ongoing. In 1992, student Chris Rabb petitioned for the removal of a racist stained glass window in the College, which depicted a chained slave kneeling at the feet of Calhoun. In 2015 and 2016, in the wake of the horrific Charleston church shooting, students mobilized to demand a name change, but Yale announced they would be keeping the name in April of 2016. Then, in July of 2016, dining hall worker Corey Menafee smashed a different stained glass window, depicting slaves picking cotton.

Some activists cite Menafee as the reason for the administration’s about-face; others cite the current political climate and ongoing student advocacy for a more inclusive campus. Whatever the reason, as of July, Calhoun College will instead honor Grace Hopper.

http://www.themarysue.com/yale-renames-calhoun-hopper/

Yale himself was a slave-trader. The bloody place should change its name.

I was just recently discussing this with someone in the civil engineering/environmental engineering business. He was lamenting the fact that finding talent has become very difficult. Even with hiring foreign workers, there's not enough talent at any price. His firm pays very well so it is not the Silicon Valley grift. He really struggles to find competent people.

The issue as he sees it is three-fold. One is it is not a sexy field. He bluntly pointed out that you don't see Jews and Asians in the field. They are in tech and the law. Another problem is the schools have made environmental engineering into a girl field. Those with talent want to either start families or go into management. Simply offering a high paying job as an engineer is not enough. The gals want a path to management.

The biggest issue he sees is the younger generation is grossly unprepared for work. Because it takes years for a college grad to mature into a fully functioning adult, the cost of hiring these people is very high, which means most employers prefer someone in their 30's and they will over pay them. My guess would be that government gets the worst of the worst now as a result.

My nephew is pursuing a PhD in civil engineering. he wanted to just go to work out of college, but the jobs were being offered to the Master’s guys. After interning at a gov’t job one summer he said there was no way he’d work for gov’t again.
As a kid he loved digging holes and collecting rocks… exactly the sort that is destined to be a civil engineer.

Another friend worked for the bureau of reclamation. All his stories were of fighting with environmentalists in order to get projects going. That and dealing with diversity hires.

What’s wrong with people that they can’t see that hiring someone who can’t do a job is a recipe for failure? It’s just nuts.

Instead of paying the contractor a large amount of money when the dam is built, the contractor should be paid a monthly fee forever.

The contractor would be responsible for both the construction and maintenance of the dam forever.

If the dam were ever deemed unsafe, the monthly fee would be immediately suspended until the dam is once again safe.

If problems with the dam are not fixed quickly, the government should have the right to confiscate the dam without compensating the contractor.

In addition, the contractor may be required to pay a large security deposit before construction begins that they will forfeit if the dam ever has serious problems.

The same arrangement could be used for roads, electricity, and border walls.

Pitt, Contractors build according to the Architect’s design and the engineer’s specs and drawings. They get paid in installments after a certain amount of the project is completed and inspected. Any changes or modifications to the original drawings are paid as a separate item called “Extras”. When the project is completed and punched listed ( any work that might not have been done in sequence), the contractor then waits for final payment and the Retention, which is a portion of monies due, usually 5-10% of the bid. Retentions are sometimes held for months if not years while the Architect, engineering firm and Project Manager argue over who owes what to whom. A bank usually holds and releases the money on a large project. In the meantime the contractors have had to make payroll, insurance, material purchases, equipment leases, insurance and fees. All major projects and contractors are performance bonded. These are some of the reasons that contractors frequently declare bankruptcy.

One thing that’s happening in engineering is not only H1B’s, but actual outsourcing of jobs to other countries. It’s really a mess when part of the design job is domestic, but another half is outsourced. A hydraulic engineer friend of mine recently had a heart attack that was at least partially induced by the stress from having to defend himself in court due to a split contract like this. There was a failure at an elaborate pumping mechanism that finally was shown to be the fault of the designer in Indonesia who failed to look at the material specs, which had even been referenced by my friend in his part of the design. The ruptured pump killed two workers who were operating it. My friend wisely makes a point of including notes on everything, even if it goes somewhat beyond his end of the design. Good thing he did and prevailed in court, or it really would have been his butt . Of course, problems like this don’t resolve so nicely when one party in question is 8000 miles away.

From the close up photos, it looks like there was a softer layer of brown soil upslope from a layer of hard gray and relatively impervious bedrock. My best guess is the ground water accumulated above the bedrock to the point that the soil was semi-liquefied, and eroded from underneath the spillway. This created a void where the spillway was not supported from below, leading to the failure. If this was the case (and I would give it a 51% probability) then it is more a problem with the original design and engineering in the 1960′s.

He spoke too loudly and lacked the slickness of a lot of the guests. It probably would be better if he does future appearances in person rather than talking head uplink. It was also excessively tense, a little more charm and a joke or two would have diffused this. A good moment to be less serious was the mention of the stupid fake scandal about Kelleyanne Conway breaking some rule by "promoting" Ivanka's clothing line.

"I am no fashion expert George, but even I can tell both Kelleyanne and Ivanka have great taste and it isn't illegal to say so. This is just the liberal media trying to create a fake scandal against two very intelligent and talented women who have been working tirelessly this past year with the President to make America great again."

On the positive side, he hammered the key points about illegal voting and illegal crime under hostile questioning. The most effective single line was probably that there are a million illegals with judicial branch issued orders of deportation, and it is the left that does not respect our judicial system.

We’re far past the point of keeping it light. The other side sees that as weakness and lack of conviction. Miller did a great job spiking the facts back into George’s face.
Bravo.

...I wonder if the quality of public works engineers has declined as we’ve moved from the construction to the maintenance era. Fifty to 100 years ago, building dams was a highly prestigious profession. Waterworks engineer William Mulholland was perhaps the leading citizen of California and his rise and fall inspired a famous movie...

My great-grandfather was a waterworks civil engineer c.1875-1900. He designed and helped build some medium size dams and waterway systems. His achievement in those days, according to his daughter-in-law, my grandmother, was considered to be equal to that of a cousin of his, who was an appellate court judge. Apparently, people were in awe of what he did at work, back then.

My great-grandfather was a waterworks civil engineer c.1875-1900. He designed and helped build some medium size dams and waterway systems. His achievement in those days, according to his daughter-in-law, my grandmother, was considered to be equal to that of a cousin of his, who was an appellate court judge

Maybe there is some equivalency in income, but no way would I rate the accomplishments of a great engineer as similar to an appellate court judge (for someone like Scalia I might make an exception). The judge’s decisions don’t have to be right. The engineer’s decisions are weighed on the scales of the universe’s physical law, and if found wanting it will be self-evident with something like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

Right now there is a big issue on the major bridge over the Delaware River that connects the PA Turnpike with the NJ Turnpike. A big truss member broke clear thru and left a gap of several inches. The load was taken up by other elements so the thing didn't just collapse into the river but it could have gone at any minute since the other elements were now overstressed. They didn't find the crack in a regular inspection - the bridge had just been painted and someone from the NJ Turnpike Authority was inspecting the paint job when he spotted the crack. They can patch the crack but now they have to test all the other elements that may have been overloaded and weakened so the bridge is closed indefinitely until they figure out whether it is safe or not.

Right now there is a big issue on the major bridge over the Delaware River that connects the PA Turnpike with the NJ Turnpike.

This should make counting the cars a lot easier, even if it means less people will be looking for America.

I was just recently discussing this with someone in the civil engineering/environmental engineering business. He was lamenting the fact that finding talent has become very difficult. Even with hiring foreign workers, there's not enough talent at any price. His firm pays very well so it is not the Silicon Valley grift. He really struggles to find competent people.

The issue as he sees it is three-fold. One is it is not a sexy field. He bluntly pointed out that you don't see Jews and Asians in the field. They are in tech and the law. Another problem is the schools have made environmental engineering into a girl field. Those with talent want to either start families or go into management. Simply offering a high paying job as an engineer is not enough. The gals want a path to management.

The biggest issue he sees is the younger generation is grossly unprepared for work. Because it takes years for a college grad to mature into a fully functioning adult, the cost of hiring these people is very high, which means most employers prefer someone in their 30's and they will over pay them. My guess would be that government gets the worst of the worst now as a result.

Your first reason matched the one ientioned in an earlier post, but your third make me think of a bigger generality.

The last two-three decades have had the Nerds win. But more than just nerds, they are Betas.

The kind of man who was a Boy Scout in the 1930s or 50s was a competent, diligent, manly man, who more often that not, was bright. Maybe not brilliant, but bright.

But now that man isn’t the engineer. He’s not the manager of engineers, even. The engineers are betas, less manly, more hipster, and not capable of the maturity needed to be good either physically or mentally with the responsibility of big scale projects.

Basic rules of engineering have been codified for decades, and novice or incompetent engineers are almost never hired to do big and important projects. I doubt it was the engineering. Most likely the contractor broke his contract by supplying substandard concrete to save himself some money on the sly. In modern construction, it's usually a crooked contractor who causes something to start falling apart prematurely, not a dumb engineer.

Part of good engineering is understanding the human element. You can either dumb down to make something comtractor friendly or ride herd on the process. My favorite Larson comic of all time:

I think it is a deliberate strategy to dilute the male-heavy gender imbalance in China that is a side effect of sex-selective abortions. The more unattached young men who go abroad and don't come back, the less the risk of domestic upheaval for China's current masters (the Communist Party).

Peri, The $1.9 Billion dollar budget shortfall seems, at least to me, to be manageable. Chicago is light $10 billion on their pension funding and Illinois is $100 billion short for their pension payments. Buffalo's Public School budget approaches one billion per year. I think that number is way low.

As I understand it that is their operating budget and does not include long-term liabilities, like under funded pensions.

Buck, California's Golden Gate Bridge Commission found $76 million to install suicide catch nets strung from both sides of the bridge. The fact that a jumper sails twenty plus feet into a steel mesh net should lead to some major injuries and probable law suits. I was an ironworker so I just had to walk on that bridge. Good lord it is a magnificent structure and seemingly well maintained by a crew of ironworkers and painters. A member of my local union, since deceased, worked on the erection of the GGB.

Muse, fearless for sure. NY state probably has more Native American ironworkers than any other part of the country, but that is about 10% of union ironworkers. My ancestors were from the Sicilian tribe.

Jack, I have done work for a local company that drilled new caissons to support new piers to brace that Delaware bridge. I saw photos that showed that the guard rails at the expansion joints (actually a gap in the rail) where the rails were leaning about a foot overboard and no one noticed.

They attributed the crack to “weather” so far. It does not appear from the photo that there was any corrosion at the point of failure – it’s shiny metal. My theory is that the expansion joints seized up and put the bridge under tension during a cold snap. The bridge is over a mile long and it shrinks considerably on a cold day. If it can’t slide in the expansion joint then it will snap at the weakest point like a rubber band.

Instead of paying the contractor a large amount of money when the dam is built, the contractor should be paid a monthly fee forever.

The contractor would be responsible for both the construction and maintenance of the dam forever.

If the dam were ever deemed unsafe, the monthly fee would be immediately suspended until the dam is once again safe.

If problems with the dam are not fixed quickly, the government should have the right to confiscate the dam without compensating the contractor.

In addition, the contractor may be required to pay a large security deposit before construction begins that they will forfeit if the dam ever has serious problems.

The same arrangement could be used for roads, electricity, and border walls.

There is a name for what you are proposing – it’s called a “lease”. But no one would ever lease you a dam under the conditions you are naming.

Say that a dam costs $100 million to build and that the monthly fee (it’s called “rent”) is $10 million per year. Where is the contractor going to get the $100 million from to build the dam with? No one has $100 million just sitting around. He would have to borrow it from a bank but banks will only lend $ on a lease if the lease has very few outs. They have to be pretty sure that you are going to collect the rent that you are going to use to service their loan. And since facilities like dams last for a long time, you would have to keep raising the rent to keep up with inflation. And you pay rent forever but if the government finances it itself then at some point the bonds are paid off.

The idea that the government would lease stuff instead of buying it is not totally crazy but it would have to be structured to make sense for both sides or no one would bid on it.

PPPs (Public/Private Partnerships) and variants thereof were the vehicles used by UK governments for many projects. The main objections seem to be where completed successfully, the private contractor gouges the public due to contracts negotiated by in house lawyers with little experience of commercial life; and where ongoing problems emerge in "completed " projects, contractors always have the poison pill of bankruptcy to leave the costs of remedial work in the public lap.

As for maintenance, well, many of the great Victorian works were left without the significant upgrades needed and now are being undertaken at vast cost in the UK, water treatment work ongoing all under Glasgow right now, with great disruption.

After a while, government will of course start complaining about the unconscionable rent it's paying to the owners. Or perhaps the California Green Party gets into power. That's when the fun begins.

In some cases, government may have to step in to make it economical to build these things. For instance, Sweden no longer indemnifies builders of nuclear plants, so it's apparently too expensive to construct new ones. Bit of a pity. In the same vein, I wonder what Berkshire Hathaway or whoever would charge to insure this dam against various costs due to disastrous failure.

He spoke too loudly and lacked the slickness of a lot of the guests. It probably would be better if he does future appearances in person rather than talking head uplink. It was also excessively tense, a little more charm and a joke or two would have diffused this. A good moment to be less serious was the mention of the stupid fake scandal about Kelleyanne Conway breaking some rule by "promoting" Ivanka's clothing line.

"I am no fashion expert George, but even I can tell both Kelleyanne and Ivanka have great taste and it isn't illegal to say so. This is just the liberal media trying to create a fake scandal against two very intelligent and talented women who have been working tirelessly this past year with the President to make America great again."

On the positive side, he hammered the key points about illegal voting and illegal crime under hostile questioning. The most effective single line was probably that there are a million illegals with judicial branch issued orders of deportation, and it is the left that does not respect our judicial system.

I rather like the fact that Miller wasn’t chummy with that Clinton hack. Staphyloccolous isn’t David Brinkley – he’s not a real journalist – he’s a Democratic party operative. I think there’s been all too much congeneality on the part of the Republicans. I like seeing them get a little hostile for a change. Stephen Miller is a smart guy,……on target, and on our side. The Democrats never act particularly nice, and it mostly seems to work for them.

Having watched the interview before reading this stuff I kept thinking "George? Who's that? The man spoke with Chris Wallace." Now I realise Miller did multiple interviews. The one with Wallace was unremarkable; i.e., Miller and Wallace didn't seem especially antagonistic to each other. Wallace asked some pointed questions, but any decent journalist ought to. Miller seemed a bit strident at points, but any sane man discussing the outrageous decision of last week rightfully would. The two even did have some light moments with smiling and chuckles. Thus, I expect the assessment that Stephanopoulos is overly partisan for disinterested journalism may have merit.

Basic rules of engineering have been codified for decades, and novice or incompetent engineers are almost never hired to do big and important projects. I doubt it was the engineering. Most likely the contractor broke his contract by supplying substandard concrete to save himself some money on the sly. In modern construction, it's usually a crooked contractor who causes something to start falling apart prematurely, not a dumb engineer.

“Basic rules of engineering have been codified for decades, and novice or incompetent engineers are almost never hired to do big and important projects. I doubt it was the engineering.”

I don’t know. Big projects are made up of lots of small projects. I’ve seen things in government paid-for-and-built structures that range from annoying to frightening.

Occam’s Butterknife says Thousand Year Flood, or evil White Mind-Rays from Trump and Bannon, or lack of a LightWorker per Mark Morford.

Occam’s Razor says import half of Mexico, get Mexico’s Infrastructure. This is not an isolated event. Rolling Blackouts are common now in SoCal, we had three last Summer. This never used to happen, SoCal native and growing up the power was ALWAYS on.

California has a Mexican Government and Legislature. Pretty much all the Legislative leaders are Mexican, some notably commenting that half their family would be deported if Trump follows through on deporting illegal aliens who have committed felonies. Like Identity Theft. The next Governor is almost certainly going to be Mexican. Mexicans not only are … Mexican, which means they have emotional, familial, and national attachments to Mexico and treat the US as a garbage dump, boarding house, and free stuff pantry, with zero, zilch, nada emotional and national ties to the US. It also means they have little accumulated wealth, human intellectual capital, or anything else to create or maintain expensive, high-maintenance infrastructure.

The Golden Gate Bridge, for example, needs constant painting and inspection. That job never stops. Dams are no different and without expensive, constantly upgraded and repaired infrastructure like dams, power lines, bridges, freeways, rail lines, port facilities, aqueducts, and the like the ability to support 35 Mexicans is nil. Most of LA’s water and power is imported. Soon the California Aqueduct will fail just like Oroville Dam, or the current hodge-podge of creaking transmission lines taking power from as far away as Arizona and Utah. [Las Vegas will fare no better.]

Lesson — living in a First World country is very expensive, having power always on, a secure supply of clean water, treating your sewage, and having a good medical care system from urgent care to first class hospitals requires both money and high IQ manpower. Neither of which are to be found in any quantity in the Third World, regardless if they are in Mexico or the US.

Unfortunately we are in the midst of a Class/Ethnic War, Puritans vs. Rednecks, and that won’t end well.

Trump should provide federal funding for the Oroville Dam under only one condition: that the dam and its adjoining property come under Federal ownership. The maintenance of the dam can be handled by the Army Corp of Engineers or private contractors outside of the corruptocracy in Sacramento. Maybe eminent domain can be used in the process.

It is clear that the California government is a failed state and that its incompetent government is putting people's lives on the line. Federal control guarantees that money allocated to the dam actually gets spent on the dam.

From the close up photos, it looks like there was a softer layer of brown soil upslope from a layer of hard gray and relatively impervious bedrock. My best guess is the ground water accumulated above the bedrock to the point that the soil was semi-liquefied, and eroded from underneath the spillway. This created a void where the spillway was not supported from below, leading to the failure. If this was the case (and I would give it a 51% probability) then it is more a problem with the original design and engineering in the 1960's.

That’s probably one reason it takes so long to build stuff these days — we know more about what could go wrong so we try to design in safety features for a host of contingencies.

Actually in IT at least, the clusterfuck series is going crescendo. Too many bad tech personnel who think reinventing square wheels in C++ is productive (been there, done that; today greenhorns fresh from uni flock to JavaScript which is possibly even worse in suckage) and crappy managers who know naught of what they are doing and are proud of it:

Download PDF at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7842842/

One combination stands out in the 2015 dataset, however: the toxic merging of overweening political interference, quixotic project goals, and ignored risks, coupled with an abysmal memory of past IT failures. The data contain example after example of executive decision making perverted by what Bent Flyvbjerg, Massimo Garbuio, and Dan Lovallo call “delusional optimism.” The decisions underlying the IT failures Romero and I reviewed involved Icarus-like hubris, especially in government programs where the incentives to manage costs are low.

Could spending trillions in Iraqistan have had anything to do with this?

What happens when the pension crisis hits? see pensiontsunami.com

Maybe they dont have enough Asian civil engineers

Is this disaster an inevitable result of third world conditions imposed on former-first world edifices, or is it the true cost of playing Empire, or is it the symbolic fluid wave of the future, or is it simply an affirmation that gravity works?

There is a name for what you are proposing - it's called a "lease". But no one would ever lease you a dam under the conditions you are naming.

Say that a dam costs $100 million to build and that the monthly fee (it's called "rent") is $10 million per year. Where is the contractor going to get the $100 million from to build the dam with? No one has $100 million just sitting around. He would have to borrow it from a bank but banks will only lend $ on a lease if the lease has very few outs. They have to be pretty sure that you are going to collect the rent that you are going to use to service their loan. And since facilities like dams last for a long time, you would have to keep raising the rent to keep up with inflation. And you pay rent forever but if the government finances it itself then at some point the bonds are paid off.

The idea that the government would lease stuff instead of buying it is not totally crazy but it would have to be structured to make sense for both sides or no one would bid on it.

PPPs (Public/Private Partnerships) and variants thereof were the vehicles used by UK governments for many projects. The main objections seem to be where completed successfully, the private contractor gouges the public due to contracts negotiated by in house lawyers with little experience of commercial life; and where ongoing problems emerge in “completed ” projects, contractors always have the poison pill of bankruptcy to leave the costs of remedial work in the public lap.

As for maintenance, well, many of the great Victorian works were left without the significant upgrades needed and now are being undertaken at vast cost in the UK, water treatment work ongoing all under Glasgow right now, with great disruption.

The thing I can't understand about the Golden Gate Bridge suicides is why anyone would jump into the water. On the Marin approach there's a 100-foot drop onto bare gravel that can be accessed by climbing over a very modest railing. I don't get why anyone would pass that by, saying, "no, I'd rather jump from midspan, where I might well break multiple bones hitting the frigid water, then remain conscious while drowning." But I guess when you get to that point in life, you're not thinking straight at all.

Faraday, I think there is something mesmerizing about water, lots of suicides at Niagara Falls where people climb a railing, drift by and are swept over the Falls to be pounded by tons of water. But your last line says it all.

With the advent of atomic and quantum physics in 30s-40s, the brightest engineering types went into the fields that became modern physics, electrical engineering, materials science. With the space race, the best and the brightest went into the above and aerospace engineering. For the last 25 years, the best and brightest science and engineering types went into computer science and software engineering.

Getting into the engineering at Cal is prestigious. But the whole college looked at the civ engs as the C students who washed out of all the other engineering majors. Because they were.

And yes, it's maintenance mode. What exciting new thing is in large scale civ eng? It's in stuff overseas.

Same reason teachers got dumber. As brightest women went into other fields, teaching (and that usually means work in daycare) is only for the average and below IQ.

the whole college looked at the civ engs as the C students who washed out of all the other engineering majors. Because they were.

Environmental engineering is even lower. My employer recently de-funded our one “Energy Sustainability Engineer” when new senior execs realized it was worthless fluff. She had a masters degree in Environmental Engineering from a prestigious east coast university, but she didn’t know how to work with spreadsheets.

I think a much bigger problem and impact is that California, with a lot of water to go around, will boom economically, and will bring in another 10 million residents.

And considering these ten million new people will come straight from the 3rs world quite literally and live ten to an apartment they’re going to have even more strain on the environment and natural resources.

Only next time there won’t be 15-20 million white Baby Boomers to keep the fuckin trainwreck going.

The average age of a white Californian is late 40s/early 50s. In 20 yrs it’s going to be interesting.

I’m shocked at the sheer rapid pace of foreign race replacement in California. Nothing like this has happened since the manifest Destiny era.

This could just be a black swan event - the spillway was built to handle the 1,000 year flood and this is the 10,000 year flood instead.

After Katrina, (NO was also built to a 1,000 year flood standard) I found out that the Dutch built to the 10,000 year standard.

It really has nothing to do with waiting 10,000 years, it's just the risk of the event happening in any given year. Each year the risk is the same whether it's been 1 year since the last big one or 5,000. Maybe the risk of 10 inches of rain on one day in any given year is 1 in 1,000 but the risk of getting 20 inches is 1/10,000.

It's all a risk/reward expected value thing. If it costs an extra $1M to build to the higher standard but the risk is 1/10,000 then it's not worth it unless the expected damages are more than $10 billion.

Maybe the risk of 10 inches of rain on one day in any given year is 1 in 1,000 but the risk of getting 20 inches is 1/10,000.

After Tropical Storm Fay in 2008 (10 inches of rain in 20 hours), I had 3/4-inch of water in my ground floor utility room. I sucked it all up w/ my wet vac.

Civil engineering is one of the lower paid disciplines of engineering. A starting graduate starts out in the $50-55k range on average and tops out somewhere in the $80-90k range. Meanwhile, there are kids who get offers to make useless apps in Silicon Valley for $90k right out of school. So yeah, most civil engineers aren't usually the A team anymore or even the B team. Anyone who has enough intelligence to pursue engineering will likely go for the better paying disciplines.

In terms of coursework and course load, civil engineering is generally the easiest major in engineering school. Electrical engineering tends to be the hardest. It’s the major to pick to have the easiest time in college and more of a social life, short of switching to lib arts.

I think that industrial engineering is the easiest engineering major. I write that as a retired I.E. major who changed majors in college from Engineering Physics to I.E. Third semester physics (quantum mechanics and relativity) convinced me that I wasn't going to cut it as a physicist and I.E.'s were getting jobs at the time, so making the change was a no-brainer.

I did have two civil engineering classes, statics and dynamics, and I wouldn't classify either of them as easy.

He spoke too loudly and lacked the slickness of a lot of the guests. It probably would be better if he does future appearances in person rather than talking head uplink. It was also excessively tense, a little more charm and a joke or two would have diffused this. A good moment to be less serious was the mention of the stupid fake scandal about Kelleyanne Conway breaking some rule by "promoting" Ivanka's clothing line.

"I am no fashion expert George, but even I can tell both Kelleyanne and Ivanka have great taste and it isn't illegal to say so. This is just the liberal media trying to create a fake scandal against two very intelligent and talented women who have been working tirelessly this past year with the President to make America great again."

On the positive side, he hammered the key points about illegal voting and illegal crime under hostile questioning. The most effective single line was probably that there are a million illegals with judicial branch issued orders of deportation, and it is the left that does not respect our judicial system.

I was quite impressed with his appearance on Chuck Todd’s show, he was well prepared, direct and unaplogetic. Clearly articulated the administration’s position. The guy has talent.

Why is the spillway so straight & narrow though? One would like to think there would be water brakes in the middle to get rid of the unleashed potential energy of the falling water masses.

I’m not a hydraulic engineer but I assume anything that would slow the water down would also tend to cause it to back up – in order to maximize the capacity of the spillway you want to make it as straight and smooth as possible.

Muse, fearless for sure. NY state probably has more Native American ironworkers than any other part of the country, but that is about 10% of union ironworkers. My ancestors were from the Sicilian tribe.

Well stated. Non-engineer politicians kick the maintenance can down the road over, and over, and over, hoping that the catastrophic failure does not happen on their watch. They get pretty much zero points for putting $$$ into maintenance and of course the expenditures can be huge and detract from more visible things being demanded and for which they will get political points. When the SHTF, all the former officials and leaders are long gone. No one politician is going to be blamed and in fact there may be good photo ops to cry, show that they care, and then milk the taxpayer for multi-millions in disaster relief because we are not heartless and it would be wrong to not do so. "What else is government for?" as a liberal friend of mine once asked. They might even milk the taxpayer for huge and questionable post-disaster repairs ($18B for post-Katrina work a good investment? I am sure there were no inflated cost estimates in all contracts and every $$ was accounted for.....in Louisiana.....). It also would be heartless to insist that people who decide to live in risky zones like floodplains have adequate insurance policies.

politicians kick the maintenance can down the road over, and over, and over, hoping that the catastrophic failure does not happen on their watch…When the SHTF, all the former officials and leaders are long gone.

Just like golf-plated six-figure lifetime pensions for cops, firefighters, and jail guards.

Buck, California's Golden Gate Bridge Commission found $76 million to install suicide catch nets strung from both sides of the bridge. The fact that a jumper sails twenty plus feet into a steel mesh net should lead to some major injuries and probable law suits. I was an ironworker so I just had to walk on that bridge. Good lord it is a magnificent structure and seemingly well maintained by a crew of ironworkers and painters. A member of my local union, since deceased, worked on the erection of the GGB.

seemingly kept in good repair…. It is not. Before they approved the ridiculous suicide catcher… which of course will cost more than 76 million and yes likely do extensive damage… it came out the bridge is in terrible repair. IN particular the South Tower. Parts of it have never been repaired in all the years.

I come from the generation that was raised, told, that the GGB was never not being repaired and painted. The work went from one end to the other, and then egan again…

Absolutely appalling. And if I never hear from another whining relative of a GGB suicide it will be too soon.

I'm not a hydraulic engineer but I assume anything that would slow the water down would also tend to cause it to back up - in order to maximize the capacity of the spillway you want to make it as straight and smooth as possible.

Jack, Strange that the spillway hits the Feather river at 90 degrees .

“As brightest women went into other fields, teaching (and that usually means work in daycare) is only for the average and below IQ.”

Wrong. The average teacher ability, as reflected by test scores, is unchanged for the past 60 years. Fewer extremely bright women become teachers, but that was offset by the number of smarter than average men entering the field.

As for California, its agriculture and commercial farming feeds a great deal of the country with relatively little employment or profit. 75% of its water is used for agriculture.

I was just recently discussing this with someone in the civil engineering/environmental engineering business. He was lamenting the fact that finding talent has become very difficult. Even with hiring foreign workers, there's not enough talent at any price. His firm pays very well so it is not the Silicon Valley grift. He really struggles to find competent people.

The issue as he sees it is three-fold. One is it is not a sexy field. He bluntly pointed out that you don't see Jews and Asians in the field. They are in tech and the law. Another problem is the schools have made environmental engineering into a girl field. Those with talent want to either start families or go into management. Simply offering a high paying job as an engineer is not enough. The gals want a path to management.

The biggest issue he sees is the younger generation is grossly unprepared for work. Because it takes years for a college grad to mature into a fully functioning adult, the cost of hiring these people is very high, which means most employers prefer someone in their 30's and they will over pay them. My guess would be that government gets the worst of the worst now as a result.

Another problem is the schools have made environmental engineering into a girl field. Those with talent want to either start families or go into management. Simply offering a high paying job as an engineer is not enough. The gals want a path to management.

I’ve seen this in Department of Energy work. The few women in the field end up in management where the men don’t want to go. The men would rather do design and research. Management is actually rather looked down upon as boring.

I’ve seen this in Department of Energy work. The few women in the field end up in management where the men don’t want to go. The men would rather do design and research. Management is actually rather looked down upon as boring.

But are these women really managers or just administrators?

My uncle worked project management on massive billion dollar engineering projects. He was a real manager. Are lower level managers really managers or are they more like a store manager who just administers policies from above more like a coordinator? Honest question. I just don't know.

On the other hand, my stepfather was a chemical engineer who turned down a lower level management job because he thought it was just too much hassle and not worth the little extra he would earn. Apparently the job really was pretty worthless because the company eliminated it in one of the cyclical downturns the oil business experiences every few years.

"As I noted the other day, Jews do not build civilizations. They let whites do the grunt work and then grab their lucrative little niche, skimming all the cream off the top."

I saw a similar comment a few years ago in a history book. According to its account the people who did the grunt work - clearing woodland for agriculture - were such people as Slavs, Celts, etc, and the chaps who skimmed the cream were the Germans.

Another problem is the schools have made environmental engineering into a girl field. Those with talent want to either start families or go into management. Simply offering a high paying job as an engineer is not enough. The gals want a path to management.

I've seen this in Department of Energy work. The few women in the field end up in management where the men don't want to go. The men would rather do design and research. Management is actually rather looked down upon as boring.

As Scott Adams has noted, the least-productive workers tend to go into management:

That's probably one reason it takes so long to build stuff these days -- we know more about what could go wrong so we try to design in safety features for a host of contingencies.

Actually in IT at least, the clusterfuck series is going crescendo. Too many bad tech personnel who think reinventing square wheels in C++ is productive (been there, done that; today greenhorns fresh from uni flock to JavaScript which is possibly even worse in suckage) and crappy managers who know naught of what they are doing and are proud of it:

One combination stands out in the 2015 dataset, however: the toxic merging of overweening political interference, quixotic project goals, and ignored risks, coupled with an abysmal memory of past IT failures. The data contain example after example of executive decision making perverted by what Bent Flyvbjerg, Massimo Garbuio, and Dan Lovallo call “delusional optimism.” The decisions underlying the IT failures Romero and I reviewed involved Icarus-like hubris, especially in government programs where the incentives to manage costs are low.

In the early days, software engineering was a true art. It was a real challenge to cram useful functionality into the minuscule memory space then available. There was a certain cockiness that came with the territory.

Now that the hardware available to the schlump on the street is literally the stuff of science fiction come to life - MU/TH/UR 6000 in Alien had a 2.1-terabyte hard drive - the slop factor is astronomical. Talented geeks who in earlier times might have sought the thrill of proving their manhood - "I'll bet you can't squeeze that into 4K" - now avoid programming altogether.

Moore's Law meets the Lewis–Mogridge Position, and the results are pretty dismal.

Probably the best business book, maybe the only good business book, is Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks, which happens to be about software failures. It's about as close to poetry as a business book will ever get.

the order was issued at 4:40 for city of Oroville, downstream to evacuate northward, toward Chico. An auxiliary spillway is expected ... to fail within hour to two hours. Not long before they held a presser to say it would not happen (!)...

Have you noticed that a majority of the visitors to the NY Times and WaPo's websites are Chinese? And I don't mean by a little. I'm talking a huge amount.

But if you look at the LA Times, China makes up a tiny portion of their readers.

Something else that's weird is that both NY Times and WaPo had huge increases in their visitors starting in the fall (which makes sense due to the election) while the LA Times visitors cratered (shouldn't they get some of that same effect). Visitors also fell off a cliff to USA Today at the same time and USA Today like the LA Times has almost no Chinese readers.

What's going on?

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/nytimes.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/washingtonpost.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/usatoday.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/latimes.com

The New York Times has been pursuing an aggressive strategy to reach readers in China. The NYT has had a Chinese-language edition on its website for quite a few years. Now the Chinese government has been blocking the NYT website since October 2012. But recently the NYT has been aggressively using different techniques to get around the “Great Firewall of China” and to get its articles accessible to Chinese readers. And people within China have been using virtual private networks (VPNs) to make an end-run around the censors and gain access to articles in the NYT and elsewhere.

I got to see the Chinese censorship policy firsthand when I was in China about a year ago. Sure enough, there was no NYT. But also, for some reason, all of Unz.com was blocked, including iSteve. So I had to do without my daily iSteve reading for a few weeks. Also no Facebook. And nothing Google – no Google Search, Google Maps or Google Translate.

I rather like the fact that Miller wasn't chummy with that Clinton hack. Staphyloccolous isn't David Brinkley - he's not a real journalist - he's a Democratic party operative. I think there's been all too much congeneality on the part of the Republicans. I like seeing them get a little hostile for a change. Stephen Miller is a smart guy,......on target, and on our side. The Democrats never act particularly nice, and it mostly seems to work for them.

Having watched the interview before reading this stuff I kept thinking “George? Who’s that? The man spoke with Chris Wallace.” Now I realise Miller did multiple interviews. The one with Wallace was unremarkable; i.e., Miller and Wallace didn’t seem especially antagonistic to each other. Wallace asked some pointed questions, but any decent journalist ought to. Miller seemed a bit strident at points, but any sane man discussing the outrageous decision of last week rightfully would. The two even did have some light moments with smiling and chuckles. Thus, I expect the assessment that Stephanopoulos is overly partisan for disinterested journalism may have merit.

This is an evacuation order.
Immediate evacuation from the low levels of Oroville and areas downstream is ordered.
A hazardous situation is developing with the Oroville Dam auxiliary spillway. Operation of the auxiliary spillway has lead to severe erosion that could lead to a failure of the structure. Failure of the auxiliary spillway structure will result in an uncontrolled release of flood waters from Lake Oroville. In response to this developing situation, DWR is increasing water releases to 100,000 cubic feet per second.
Immediate evacuation from the low levels of Oroville and areas downstream is ordered.
This in NOT A Drill. This in NOT A Drill. This in NOT A Drill.

In terms of coursework and course load, civil engineering is generally the easiest major in engineering school. Electrical engineering tends to be the hardest. It's the major to pick to have the easiest time in college and more of a social life, short of switching to lib arts.

I think that industrial engineering is the easiest engineering major. I write that as a retired I.E. major who changed majors in college from Engineering Physics to I.E. Third semester physics (quantum mechanics and relativity) convinced me that I wasn’t going to cut it as a physicist and I.E.’s were getting jobs at the time, so making the change was a no-brainer.

I did have two civil engineering classes, statics and dynamics, and I wouldn’t classify either of them as easy.

just caught an emergency update on Oroville... immediate evacuation... I did not hear how extensive (extent of land mass) but three times repeat: This is not a drill.

the order was issued at 4:40 for city of Oroville, downstream to evacuate northward, toward Chico. An auxiliary spillway is expected … to fail within hour to two hours. Not long before they held a presser to say it would not happen (!)…

seemingly kept in good repair.... It is not. Before they approved the ridiculous suicide catcher... which of course will cost more than 76 million and yes likely do extensive damage... it came out the bridge is in terrible repair. IN particular the South Tower. Parts of it have never been repaired in all the years.

I come from the generation that was raised, told, that the GGB was never not being repaired and painted. The work went from one end to the other, and then egan again...

Absolutely appalling. And if I never hear from another whining relative of a GGB suicide it will be too soon.

Hidden, Thank you, I was let to believe it was start at one end work to the other and then start over again.

"Trump’s Luck: an opportunity to appear magnanimous and presidential to California. He should take it."

Indeed. Trump needs to look presidential. Much of the West is facing imminent threat of flooding due to record snowfalls it hasn't seen in decades. I live in the West and, so far as I can tell, Trump has said nothing about it.

I love love love Trump on immigration and trade, but my biggest fear about him is that he'll make such a mess of the rest of his job that he'll permanently damage those causes. Trump needs to start sounding presidential. Trump gets to come out ahead on an issue that will win him sympathy, and leftist governors like Jerry Brown have to buy that money by publicly showing him a little respect. It's a win win for absolutely everyone.

Trump *cannot* be seen as ignoring the looming flooding crisis in the West.

Muse, fearless for sure. NY state probably has more Native American ironworkers than any other part of the country, but that is about 10% of union ironworkers. My ancestors were from the Sicilian tribe.

Hidden, I share your concern about poor maintainance of the GGB but the main cables ( which are a bundle of spun wire cable) are covered by a steel sheath and some rust and peeling paint is a feature of any steel structure that is bathed in saltwater mist, spray and fog.

The New York Times has been pursuing an aggressive strategy to reach readers in China. The NYT has had a Chinese-language edition on its website for quite a few years. Now the Chinese government has been blocking the NYT website since October 2012. But recently the NYT has been aggressively using different techniques to get around the "Great Firewall of China" and to get its articles accessible to Chinese readers. And people within China have been using virtual private networks (VPNs) to make an end-run around the censors and gain access to articles in the NYT and elsewhere.

I got to see the Chinese censorship policy firsthand when I was in China about a year ago. Sure enough, there was no NYT. But also, for some reason, all of Unz.com was blocked, including iSteve. So I had to do without my daily iSteve reading for a few weeks. Also no Facebook. And nothing Google - no Google Search, Google Maps or Google Translate.

The people affected by the (hopefully not occurring) damn disaster are probably among the third of Californians who voted for Trump. It would not be a bad idea for him to take some interest in this. No, he will never win the state of California, but other people in states he can win (and has won) might notice.

I would not be surprised if engineers and inspectors were aware of the problem a year or two ago (as seems to be the case) but that the decision makers chose not to do anything about it because, due to GLOBAL WARMING and California’s drought into perpetuity, nothing needed to be done. The spillway would never be needed.

On the side topic of which engineering fields are harder, my totally biased viewpoint:

Civil engineering (CE) has a lot of complicated stuff in it (stress analysis, fluid dynamics) and tends to deal with messy pribkems, but there is more experience base in CE than anywhere else, and the factors of safety applied to the designs are high. But CEs need to get their PE stamp to do much real work, and that is non-trivial.

Industrial engineering (IE) is easy until you get to a certain level of complexity, and then it gets hard. A lot of mathematically difficult optimization techniques (e.g., linear programming) came out of operations analysis, a sub field of IE, but you can be an IE and never get anywhere near that stuff.

Electrical engineering (EE) has easy and hard things in it. Digital logic is not that hard, but advanced chip design is, and advanced analog stuff – think antenna design and computational electromagnetics – can be really tough. Control design and analysis, which has roots in EE, AE, and ME, is a very deep field.

Mechanical engineering (ME) education is pretty tough because the ME degree is so versatile; the school is trying to get you ready for almost anything. The actual job varies widely. The subspeciality of loads and dynamics is pretty tough, especially for composite aerospace structures. But a lot of the less sharp MEs end up basically doing supplier management.

Aerospace engineering (AE) is at heart a branch of ME that deals with aircraft and spacecraft, and as such has a lot of specialized knowledge. The design problems in AE tend to be harder than ME, because aircraft and spacecraft tend to be extremely integrated and the factors of safety are thin; 1.25 to 1.5 or so, way less than most other things. So the analyses must be better to get by with those thin margins, and analytical techniques in structure design, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and control systems have been pushed more over the last 75 years by aircraft and spacecraft than by anything else.

As for me, I’m an AE with a background in flight control system analysis and design…

A Marine Engineer of my acquaintance likes to rail against Aerospace Engineering being held up as an example of a difficult subject: "Half the time they're not operating in a fluid, and when they do it's not even viscous!"

January 11 2011. The dam was originally built for flood mitigation and completed in 1981. Conservationists have prevented any more dams being built in Queensland since, so it's water is now used to supply Brisbane. Poor summer rainfall in the early 2000s saw water levels drop at Wivenhoe, and the State Government introduced water restrictions and spent Billion$ building a water recycling network that is unused. Rain started falling again in 2009, but restrictions weren't lifted. The catchment area is 7,000 sq. kilometres, and Wivenhoe fills quickly when it's raining in the catchment. In January 2011 rain had been falling in the catchment and downstream since Christmas. The operators didn't open the dam gates until water was about to spill over the top, which would have been catastrophic.645,000 litres/sec.[c.145,000 gallons/sec] then poured into the Brisbane River, causing heavy flooding and Billion$ in property damage. The problem started in 2006, when the Beattie Government removed control of water assets from Local Councils to the State Government. Under the Councils, dam operators would take tidal conditions, whether or not it was raining upstream, and weather conditions downstream into consideration, before releasing water, thereby averting disasters like the Brisbane Floods 2011. Under State Government control, operators can't take any of these factors into account in releasing water from dams and weirs, as the State Government's only concern is to conserve water[because Global Warming] . They obey a Manual. So most floods in Queensland since then have been caused by Government.Cloward-Piven Strategy, perhaps?

“Immigration” is the topic setting everyone off right now, mostly for the wrong reasons. It’s the money! We don’t have it. $600,000 for every immigrant without a high school education! Every educated H1-B visa handed out costs Americans $2 million in lost income.

“Infrastructure” is the word that will come up next. Flint’s water is bad? $220 million to fix it. An 11 foot diameter sewer pipe failed in east Detroit recently; $140 million to fix it. We will need to raise $trillions just to maintain what we have today in America.

Stop talking about Muslims, stop talking about refugees, stop talking about Trump, stop talking about terrorism and start talking about MONEY! We need to push every single illegal and every unnecessary legal immigrant OUT, because we don’t have the MONEY! We need that money for infrastructure, if you want the lights and heat and water and roads to work!

We need to push every single illegal and every unnecessary legal immigrant OUT, because we don’t have the MONEY! We need that money for infrastructure, if you want the lights and heat and water and roads to work!

But immigrants are a face pressed against the window; thus in this age of emotion we shovel food, clothing, and shelter at them. I suspect much of the costs you list comes from the bureaucracies and support groups that have grown around the immigrant "pipeline"; thus advocacy groups with an incentive to keep the face pressed against the window.

Infrastructure, as noted several times in this thread, has little emotional appeal aside from the occasional disaster.

On the side topic of which engineering fields are harder, my totally biased viewpoint:

Civil engineering (CE) has a lot of complicated stuff in it (stress analysis, fluid dynamics) and tends to deal with messy pribkems, but there is more experience base in CE than anywhere else, and the factors of safety applied to the designs are high. But CEs need to get their PE stamp to do much real work, and that is non-trivial.

Industrial engineering (IE) is easy until you get to a certain level of complexity, and then it gets hard. A lot of mathematically difficult optimization techniques (e.g., linear programming) came out of operations analysis, a sub field of IE, but you can be an IE and never get anywhere near that stuff.

Electrical engineering (EE) has easy and hard things in it. Digital logic is not that hard, but advanced chip design is, and advanced analog stuff - think antenna design and computational electromagnetics - can be really tough. Control design and analysis, which has roots in EE, AE, and ME, is a very deep field.

Mechanical engineering (ME) education is pretty tough because the ME degree is so versatile; the school is trying to get you ready for almost anything. The actual job varies widely. The subspeciality of loads and dynamics is pretty tough, especially for composite aerospace structures. But a lot of the less sharp MEs end up basically doing supplier management.

Aerospace engineering (AE) is at heart a branch of ME that deals with aircraft and spacecraft, and as such has a lot of specialized knowledge. The design problems in AE tend to be harder than ME, because aircraft and spacecraft tend to be extremely integrated and the factors of safety are thin; 1.25 to 1.5 or so, way less than most other things. So the analyses must be better to get by with those thin margins, and analytical techniques in structure design, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and control systems have been pushed more over the last 75 years by aircraft and spacecraft than by anything else.

As for me, I'm an AE with a background in flight control system analysis and design... :-)

“But CEs need to get their PE stamp to do much real work, and that is non-trivial. ”

At 10:50PM Eastern shocked no major news network has broken format to show this very visual unfolding disaster. The video is compelling and terrifying. When they pan back and show you the riverside communities all lit up it brings the danger into a real focus.

From the looks of the video feed on line, inexplicably local and state police are not directing evacuees to use both sides of the highway to get out.

"At 10:50PM Eastern shocked no major news network has broken format to show this very visual unfolding disaster. The video is compelling and terrifying. When they pan back and show you the riverside communities all lit up it brings the danger into a real focus."

I was just looking at the various news channels on TV, and there's nothing about the dam.

The sacbee article linked from drudge claimed 100K cubic feet per second. 1 cubic feet ~ 8 gallons. 1 acre foot is ~ 500K gallons. So about 1.5 acre feet per second. I don't know the reservoir area, but it's probably constant enough near the top that no calculus is needed for a ballpark estimate.

"Immigration" is the topic setting everyone off right now, mostly for the wrong reasons. It's the money! We don't have it. $600,000 for every immigrant without a high school education! Every educated H1-B visa handed out costs Americans $2 million in lost income.

"Infrastructure" is the word that will come up next. Flint's water is bad? $220 million to fix it. An 11 foot diameter sewer pipe failed in east Detroit recently; $140 million to fix it. We will need to raise $trillions just to maintain what we have today in America.

Stop talking about Muslims, stop talking about refugees, stop talking about Trump, stop talking about terrorism and start talking about MONEY! We need to push every single illegal and every unnecessary legal immigrant OUT, because we don't have the MONEY! We need that money for infrastructure, if you want the lights and heat and water and roads to work!

It's still pretty awe-inspiring now. But then sometime in the 1960s, the environmental movement decided dams were evil. As John McPhee observed about environmentalists at the time,

"The outermost circle of the [environmentalists'] Devil’s world seems to be a moat filled mainly with DDT. Next to it is a moat of burning gasoline. Within that is a ring of pinheads each covered with a million people – and so on past phalanxed bulldozers and bicuspid chain saws into the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam. Conservationists who can hold themselves in reasonable check before new oil spills and fresh megalopolises mysteriously go insane at even the thought of a dam."

Of course, a lot of those environmentalists were (and still are) literally living from the water supplied by that western dam and aqueduct system.

I once wondered why it is that there can be droughts in the American Great Plains, when those plains are adjacent to the single biggest supply of fresh water on Earth (the Great Lakes). A bit of googling showed me (as it often does) that I was not the first one to ask this question, and indeed there were even some answers. After finishing the great California water projects, those engineers had gone on to plan perhaps the largest engineering feat in all of human history: a vast network of dams, reservoirs and aqueducts stretching all the way from Canada in the north down to Mexico in the south, from the Great Plains and Lakes in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west.

The retrospective consensus seemed to be that it was never built because it was too expensive, about $30 bil. in the 1920s, if I recall correctly, but even adjusted for inflation, that doesn't seem so much when we're tossing trillions into corrupt banks and pointless wars. And, when repairing one lousy spillway is a nine-figure project, a continent-spanning system that would make the deserts bloom for a (inflation-adjusted) trillion or three seems pretty inexpensive by comparison (not to mention providing jobs other than bankster or war profiteer).

I suspect the real reason it was never built wasn't so much the cost to build it as it was the specter of success: Malthusian force would bring about vast new settlements whose continued existence could be turned on or off at the flip of a hydro-switch. In other words, it was the first and biggest NIMBY victim. There was probably also some consternation about how would poor Mexico pay rich Canada for its water?

But anyway, if it is ever built, it would surely make Civil Engineering Great Again.

I believe I read once that in pre-Columbian America, numerous beaver dams had accomplished much the same thing as the vast civic works project you are describing. The Great Plains as we know them today are in part the creation of the numerous fur trappers who laid waste to the beaver population before the area had been widely settled or surveyed. The new ecological balance that resulted was more conducive to the multiplication of the American bison, which swelled in to vast herds that further trampled and desertified the Midwest. That resulted in the Indians having to change their lifestyle to become more intensive hunters of bison, which change they pursued in the grossest manner possible, viz. by setting the prairie ablaze in order to stampede the bison over escarpments so that that they could “clean up” the injured ones, further exacerbating the desertification cycle. It is worth noting in this connection that the Hernando De Soto expedition traveled extensively throughout the American south and southwest in the 1500s and does not record ever having set eyes on a single buffalo.

This is very interesting. Trappers made everything unsustainable. Or maybe beavers did. Or bison. Or Indians. Or... How many bison did Buffalo Bill shoot? I say he's the new patient zero for modern America and not Al Capone or OJ Simpson.

Beaver provide stability to stream systems, but they also were creators of a lot of fertile land in otherwise unfertile places. After they have flooded several acres for several decades, they leave and the wetness recedes. What's left is the beneficiary of years of siltation, a leveling of the land, and more nutrieents from decaying plant and animal matter: prime farmland.

‘Even for those heady times, NAWAPA was a grand plan. It proposed to tap some of the continent’s largest rivers — including the Yukon in Alaska, and the Peace and Fraser in British Columbia — and store most of it in an enormous valley that runs the length of British Columbia, turning the much of the valley into a reservoir 500 miles long. (Lake Mead on the Colorado River, the largest reservoir in the United States, is 112 miles long when full.) A canal would carry fresh water from British Columbia 2,000 miles east to the Great Lakes, diluting their polluted waters and, not incidentally, opening a commercial waterway from Vancouver to Lake Superior. Other canals, tunnels, and pumps would send water from the reservoir in British Columbia to some of the driest regions of the United States and Mexico: the inland Pacific Northwest, the Great Basin, Southern California and the desert Southwest, and the northern Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua.”

Actually in IT at least, the clusterfuck series is going crescendo. Too many bad tech personnel who think reinventing square wheels in C++ is productive (been there, done that; today greenhorns fresh from uni flock to JavaScript which is possibly even worse in suckage) and crappy managers who know naught of what they are doing and are proud of it:

Download PDF at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7842842/

One combination stands out in the 2015 dataset, however: the toxic merging of overweening political interference, quixotic project goals, and ignored risks, coupled with an abysmal memory of past IT failures. The data contain example after example of executive decision making perverted by what Bent Flyvbjerg, Massimo Garbuio, and Dan Lovallo call “delusional optimism.” The decisions underlying the IT failures Romero and I reviewed involved Icarus-like hubris, especially in government programs where the incentives to manage costs are low.

In the early days, software engineering was a true art. It was a real challenge to cram useful functionality into the minuscule memory space then available. There was a certain cockiness that came with the territory.

Now that the hardware available to the schlump on the street is literally the stuff of science fiction come to life – MU/TH/UR 6000 in Alien had a 2.1-terabyte hard drive – the slop factor is astronomical. Talented geeks who in earlier times might have sought the thrill of proving their manhood – “I’ll bet you can’t squeeze that into 4K” – now avoid programming altogether.

Moore’s Law meets the Lewis–Mogridge Position, and the results are pretty dismal.

Watching this unfold for three days now. Have seen pics online showing the progression of damage to the spillway. Pics dated 2013 show damage to the concrete in the same spot where failure occured. If pics and dates prove legit, this was a long neglected issue.

Dam engineers are in ongoing catch22. They have to keep the spillway open, otherwise the emergency relief slope could fail. Meanwhile the damage to actual spillway is getting worse and could threaten the base of the dam. BTW, more rain coming this week. This has been getting worse for days and I suspect worst is yet to come.

bomag, Africa has worn out most of the infrastructure that the Colonists left them. The Chinese have stepped in to start over. Of course in a few years the Chinese will be the new Colonists in Africa.

Seems like the Chinese are spreading themselves too thin. When the world turns against them, and they will, they will not be majority anywhere.

“the Chinese are spreading themselves too thin”

I think it is a deliberate strategy to dilute the male-heavy gender imbalance in China that is a side effect of sex-selective abortions. The more unattached young men who go abroad and don’t come back, the less the risk of domestic upheaval for China’s current masters (the Communist Party).

Try to solve the problem of gargantuan levels of stinking, unproductive, bad debt by flooding the financial system with the cheapest of cheap credit, only to have all that cash erode the productive base of the economy.

Look out below. Best to evacuate to the long-abandoned goldfields, if you know what I mean.

Just talked to an Oroville police officer who tells us two stores have been looted as a result of #OrovilleDam evacuations

The occurrence of violent crime in Oroville, CA is 56% higher than the average rate of crime in California and 78% higher than the rest of the nation. Similarly, crime involving property stands 168% higher than the remainder of the state of California and 182% higher than the nation’s average. Both of these statistics relate to how safe residents and businesses are while performing everyday activities in the Oroville, CA area.

"Immigration" is the topic setting everyone off right now, mostly for the wrong reasons. It's the money! We don't have it. $600,000 for every immigrant without a high school education! Every educated H1-B visa handed out costs Americans $2 million in lost income.

"Infrastructure" is the word that will come up next. Flint's water is bad? $220 million to fix it. An 11 foot diameter sewer pipe failed in east Detroit recently; $140 million to fix it. We will need to raise $trillions just to maintain what we have today in America.

Stop talking about Muslims, stop talking about refugees, stop talking about Trump, stop talking about terrorism and start talking about MONEY! We need to push every single illegal and every unnecessary legal immigrant OUT, because we don't have the MONEY! We need that money for infrastructure, if you want the lights and heat and water and roads to work!

Thanks for listening, sorry I had to shout.

Every educated H1-B visa handed out costs Americans $2 million in lost income.

When I worked alongside H1-B visa guys from India in the Nineties, they did the same job as a guy making ~$100K per year in salary and benefits. Once in place, they didn't leave. I knew personally Indian guys who had been here more than a decade. (The way their visas are handled, it is very difficult for them to jump to another company - another benefit for employers.)

One H1-B visa guy stays for 20 years, gets paid $100K in salary and benefits
equals
$2 million in wages denied American workers over that period.

It really adds up fast. In the company I worked with, the department had about 50 guys from India working in a variety of engineering functions. They were paid half of what American engineers were paid.

That's fifty guys times $100K per year equals $5 million per year in income that could have been going to American engineers in my area. That's a load of money.

At 10:50PM Eastern shocked no major news network has broken format to show this very visual unfolding disaster. The video is compelling and terrifying. When they pan back and show you the riverside communities all lit up it brings the danger into a real focus.

From the looks of the video feed on line, inexplicably local and state police are not directing evacuees to use both sides of the highway to get out.

“At 10:50PM Eastern shocked no major news network has broken format to show this very visual unfolding disaster. The video is compelling and terrifying. When they pan back and show you the riverside communities all lit up it brings the danger into a real focus.”

I was just looking at the various news channels on TV, and there’s nothing about the dam.

Have you noticed that a majority of the visitors to the NY Times and WaPo's websites are Chinese? And I don't mean by a little. I'm talking a huge amount.

But if you look at the LA Times, China makes up a tiny portion of their readers.

Something else that's weird is that both NY Times and WaPo had huge increases in their visitors starting in the fall (which makes sense due to the election) while the LA Times visitors cratered (shouldn't they get some of that same effect). Visitors also fell off a cliff to USA Today at the same time and USA Today like the LA Times has almost no Chinese readers.

What's going on?

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/nytimes.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/washingtonpost.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/usatoday.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/latimes.com

Part of it could simply that China has the world’s largest population connected to the internet, so whatever they happen to look at will inevitably show up red–even if it is only the 38th most poplar site–in Alexa’s somewhat misleading map that is based on absolute numbers rather than per capita.

Another possibility is that fake news sites like the NYT are paying for fake subscribers from Chinese click-farms to keep their ad rates up.

Why? Do you think Jerry Brown moved lots of African Americans there recently in anticipation?

Even though I live in CA, I think Trump should say 'screw you' to Brown.

However, there is much to be said for being magnanimous and going high when CA goes begging.

The people affected by the (hopefully not occurring) damn disaster are probably among the third of Californians who voted for Trump. It would not be a bad idea for him to take some interest in this. No, he will never win the state of California, but other people in states he can win (and has won) might notice.

Having watched the interview before reading this stuff I kept thinking "George? Who's that? The man spoke with Chris Wallace." Now I realise Miller did multiple interviews. The one with Wallace was unremarkable; i.e., Miller and Wallace didn't seem especially antagonistic to each other. Wallace asked some pointed questions, but any decent journalist ought to. Miller seemed a bit strident at points, but any sane man discussing the outrageous decision of last week rightfully would. The two even did have some light moments with smiling and chuckles. Thus, I expect the assessment that Stephanopoulos is overly partisan for disinterested journalism may have merit.

Chris Wallace seems to be pretty fair. He’s certainly a much better and more disinterested journalist than Bill Clinton’s little buddy, George Stephanopoulis.

Try to solve the problem of gargantuan levels of stinking, unproductive, bad debt by flooding the financial system with the cheapest of cheap credit, only to have all that cash erode the productive base of the economy.

Look out below. Best to evacuate to the long-abandoned goldfields, if you know what I mean.

“Look out below. Best to evacuate to the long-abandoned goldfields, if you know what I mean.”

It would be useful to know the arithmetic for translating net outflow of cubic feet per second into acre feet of water into change in elevation of the top of the reservoir.

It's been a while, but I think this is a basic calculus problem. I remember lots of problems like this in calculus problem sets, often involving bathtubs and the like which can be analogous to dams.

The sacbee article linked from drudge claimed 100K cubic feet per second. 1 cubic feet ~ 8 gallons. 1 acre foot is ~ 500K gallons. So about 1.5 acre feet per second. I don’t know the reservoir area, but it’s probably constant enough near the top that no calculus is needed for a ballpark estimate.

What they need is a pipeline to suck water out of the lake and release it down the mountainside away from the structures at risk so the erosion is caused in a safer area. Something like that doesn't sound impossible to rig up before the point of maximum danger in about, say, a week.

I would not be surprised if engineers and inspectors were aware of the problem a year or two ago (as seems to be the case) but that the decision makers chose not to do anything about it because, due to GLOBAL WARMING and California's drought into perpetuity, nothing needed to be done. The spillway would never be needed.

So what will the president’s response be to governor Brown’s request for assistance?
A/ I promised to rebuild American’s infrastructure, and this will be a great place to start. The spillway repair is something absolutely essential for the citizens, and disaster assistance is not a political issue. Melania and I are praying for the residents of the Oroville area.

B/ We will help out, but you have to promise in return to help us return illegal immigrants to their native country, especially criminals.

At 10:50PM Eastern shocked no major news network has broken format to show this very visual unfolding disaster. The video is compelling and terrifying. When they pan back and show you the riverside communities all lit up it brings the danger into a real focus.

From the looks of the video feed on line, inexplicably local and state police are not directing evacuees to use both sides of the highway to get out.

I first heard of this story via Twitter on Friday and then saw this post. This morning, I searched the NY Times and there was no coverage whatsoever.

216 Why not pump water over the main dam? I think fire engines do 1 thousand gallons per minute. Put in twenty engines now, and get BIG pumps there asap!

It would be a drop in a bucket. 20000 gallons per minute is 333 gallons per second is 45 cfs (cubic feet per second). Compared to 100,000 cfs going over the main spillway.

What they need is a pipeline to suck water out of the lake and release it down the mountainside away from the structures at risk so the erosion is caused in a safer area. Something like that doesn’t sound impossible to rig up before the point of maximum danger in about, say, a week.

240 The sacbee article linked from drudge claimed 100K cubic feet per second. 1 cubic feet ~ 8 gallons. 1 acre foot is ~ 500K gallons. So about 1.5 acre feet per second. I don’t know the reservoir area, but it’s probably constant enough near the top that no calculus is needed for a ballpark estimate.

According to google the surface area is 25 square miles. There are 640 acres per square mile so 16000 acres. An acre foot is the amount of water required to cover an acre 1 foot deep. So to lower the level 1 foot you must remove 16000 acre feet of water. An acre is 43560 square feet so an acre foot is 43560 cubic feet. So 100000 cfs is about 2.3 acre feet per second. So you need about 7000 seconds or a bit under 2 hours to drop the level a foot. But that assumes no water is coming in.

So what will the president's response be to governor Brown's request for assistance?A/ I promised to rebuild American's infrastructure, and this will be a great place to start. The spillway repair is something absolutely essential for the citizens, and disaster assistance is not a political issue. Melania and I are praying for the residents of the Oroville area.

B/ We will help out, but you have to promise in return to help us return illegal immigrants to their native country, especially criminals.

What they need is a pipeline to suck water out of the lake and release it down the mountainside away from the structures at risk so the erosion is caused in a safer area. Something like that doesn't sound impossible to rig up before the point of maximum danger in about, say, a week.

I propose the world’s biggest Slip n Slide.

A few giant dump trucks of gravel and then all the vinyl sheeting they can get on short notice on the west coast.

It strikes me that when the water level in the dam was very low earlier this year, they could have easily and safely removed the debris from those turbines. Either nobody was thinking ahead, or else (more likely) there was no extra money in the budget to do it.

What they need is a pipeline to suck water out of the lake and release it down the mountainside away from the structures at risk so the erosion is caused in a safer area. Something like that doesn't sound impossible to rig up before the point of maximum danger in about, say, a week.

I have seen plastic drainage pipes that are about five to ten feet in diameter. They look pretty light.

I am sure that there are a lot in California that could be trucked in and set up quickly.

I am not sure how they would start a siphon over the lip, but I am not an engineer.

Yes, and here's the thing: How do we know this upcoming week will be the Ultimate Crisis of 2017. It's not impossible for there to be even heavier rains in March and, perhaps, early April. So if somebody could come up with a plan that would take a month to get operational, it might turn out to be highly useful during the Great Late March Storm of 2017.

Yes. Beats my idea. A row of pipes each ten feet in diameter, u-shapes, over the top of the dam, extending ten feet below the level of the lake on the water side and the same over the fall. Removeable plug on the outside hole. Fill with water, remove plug over the drop, siphon. That size pipe would fit on a flatbed truck (Might blow the tires though).

The last set of storms to come through raised the reservoir level by 52 feet since the beginning of the month. Since it takes a few days for the water to filter down out of the mountains, they might, just barely, have time to lower the level by about that much.

Bureau of Reclamation has struggled with spillway damage/failure on their dams. At higher flows, turbulence and the resulting cavitation were problems not anticipated by the initial designers. This looks like the issue here.

Maintenance is definitely less glamorous than building, but no less important. I often wonder if the "wizards of build" might leave us with structures too complicated for the coming idiocracy to maintain. I hear rumors that the retiring managers of the electric power grid have no confidence in their replacements to maintain the thing.

It could have all been prevented if they had gotten some car batteries to the site on time.

However, first they didn’t have the money to buy the batteries in local stores and then, when they did round up the batteries in Tokyo, they didn’t have the proper permit to transport them on the highway.

As a result of rigid rule-following northern Japan ended up with a nuclear wasteland for decades or centuries to come.

Wait. This is not the first time that a dam disaster has happened in an Anglo country.

A few years ago (maybe 5?), there was a similar disaster in Queensland, Australia, near Brisbane.

The operators waited too long to start letting the water go, and there was a last minute surge or something, and a catastrophe occurred.

How is it that government employees never learn?

January 11 2011. The dam was originally built for flood mitigation and completed in 1981. Conservationists have prevented any more dams being built in Queensland since, so it’s water is now used to supply Brisbane. Poor summer rainfall in the early 2000s saw water levels drop at Wivenhoe, and the State Government introduced water restrictions and spent Billion$ building a water recycling network that is unused.
Rain started falling again in 2009, but restrictions weren’t lifted. The catchment area is 7,000 sq. kilometres, and Wivenhoe fills quickly when it’s raining in the catchment. In January 2011 rain had been falling in the catchment and downstream since Christmas. The operators didn’t open the dam gates until water was about to spill over the top, which would have been catastrophic.
645,000 litres/sec.[c.145,000 gallons/sec] then poured into the Brisbane River, causing heavy flooding and Billion$ in property damage.
The problem started in 2006, when the Beattie Government removed control of water assets from Local Councils to the State Government. Under the Councils, dam operators would take tidal conditions, whether or not it was raining upstream, and weather conditions downstream into consideration, before releasing water, thereby averting disasters like the Brisbane Floods 2011.
Under State Government control, operators can’t take any of these factors into account in releasing water from dams and weirs, as the State Government’s only concern is to conserve water[because Global Warming] . They obey a Manual. So most floods in Queensland since then have been caused by Government.
Cloward-Piven Strategy, perhaps?

"Immigration" is the topic setting everyone off right now, mostly for the wrong reasons. It's the money! We don't have it. $600,000 for every immigrant without a high school education! Every educated H1-B visa handed out costs Americans $2 million in lost income.

"Infrastructure" is the word that will come up next. Flint's water is bad? $220 million to fix it. An 11 foot diameter sewer pipe failed in east Detroit recently; $140 million to fix it. We will need to raise $trillions just to maintain what we have today in America.

Stop talking about Muslims, stop talking about refugees, stop talking about Trump, stop talking about terrorism and start talking about MONEY! We need to push every single illegal and every unnecessary legal immigrant OUT, because we don't have the MONEY! We need that money for infrastructure, if you want the lights and heat and water and roads to work!

Thanks for listening, sorry I had to shout.

We need to push every single illegal and every unnecessary legal immigrant OUT, because we don’t have the MONEY! We need that money for infrastructure, if you want the lights and heat and water and roads to work!

But immigrants are a face pressed against the window; thus in this age of emotion we shovel food, clothing, and shelter at them. I suspect much of the costs you list comes from the bureaucracies and support groups that have grown around the immigrant “pipeline”; thus advocacy groups with an incentive to keep the face pressed against the window.

Infrastructure, as noted several times in this thread, has little emotional appeal aside from the occasional disaster.

"Infrastructure, as noted several times in this thread, has little emotional appeal aside from the occasional disaster."

No kidding.

An immigrant family recently made it through to Detroit. My wife (and I'm sure most liberals) was tearing up at the wonderful "feels" of being open and accepting and helpful.

I, on the other hand, was toting up the costs:

- one 70 year old grandmother who will spend on average $150,000 in health care costs before dying
- two parents who don't speak English, don't have a skill, don't have jobs - are eligible for a Michigan Bridge card - a free money card with 24 x 7 customer support in various languages in case refugees can't figure out how to spend our money
- one ten year old kid who will spend 8 more years in public school @ $8,900 per year
- one eight year old special needs kid who will spend 10 years @ $8,900 + $6,200 per year
- they are all eligible for a variety of free federal programs as well

Who knew that "financially responsible adult" is just secret code for "racist"?

Trump is going to need every one of his 1,435 remaining days in office to make a dent in this problem.

But immigrants are a face pressed against the window; thus in this age of emotion we shovel food, clothing, and shelter at them.

And schooling, and seats in our best universities, and medical care, and cash payments, and "disability" payments, and tax "rebates" despite zero dollars put into the system, and balloon loans to blow up our banking system, and....

I live in Sacramento three blocks from the American River where the water was at the foot of the levee two days ago (maybe 15 feet below the top, but it still looked like the Mississippi to me in it’s width compared to normal).

To any snide commenters here, I am not having any fun laughing at the a-holes who have effed up my State, this beautiful and amazing territory.

Whether the failure of the Oroville dam spillway was due to lack of maintenance remains to be seen. Cracks were repaired recently (2007 or so). It was a 1957 dam design.

Yes, I know our roads have been neglected, but dams? That jury’s out as far as I know.

In 1997, I saw the water rise on the American River to within two feet of the top of the levee. This is very scary shit. I live in River Park. Check it out on your Google Map. In 1986, we were a few hours from evacuation, too, as in 1997.

Thank God that after Katrina in New Orleans, we got a rehab of our levees, but flood may still come. We have a forecast of a week of rain to come around Wednesday.

It is incredibly stressing to worry about what to take and abandon and leave your home to the mercy of the weather gods, and where to go? (All the motels etc are filled up with evacuees from the north. And I don’t have any friends or relatives to evacuate to. (Hey, Steve, up for guests?)

The people north of us are going through some horrible moments and days. God bless and protect them.

No, Steve, from what I understand, Sacramento is in no great danger from Lake Orroville collapsing. The radius of the water dispersing across the Valley is very wide before it reaches us (thank God).

DWR needs to lower the lake level by another 50 feet to prepare for the incoming storms.

https://www.reddit.com/live/yfixu0gbq4ub/

The last set of storms to come through raised the reservoir level by 52 feet since the beginning of the month. Since it takes a few days for the water to filter down out of the mountains, they might, just barely, have time to lower the level by about that much.

I have seen plastic drainage pipes that are about five to ten feet in diameter. They look pretty light.

I am sure that there are a lot in California that could be trucked in and set up quickly.

I am not sure how they would start a siphon over the lip, but I am not an engineer.

https://www.google.com/search?q=plastic+drainage+pipe+large

Yes, and here’s the thing: How do we know this upcoming week will be the Ultimate Crisis of 2017. It’s not impossible for there to be even heavier rains in March and, perhaps, early April. So if somebody could come up with a plan that would take a month to get operational, it might turn out to be highly useful during the Great Late March Storm of 2017.

Yes, and here's the thing: How do we know this upcoming week will be the Ultimate Crisis of 2017. It's not impossible for there to be even heavier rains in March and, perhaps, early April. So if somebody could come up with a plan that would take a month to get operational, it might turn out to be highly useful during the Great Late March Storm of 2017.

I have seen plastic drainage pipes that are about five to ten feet in diameter. They look pretty light.

I am sure that there are a lot in California that could be trucked in and set up quickly.

I am not sure how they would start a siphon over the lip, but I am not an engineer.

https://www.google.com/search?q=plastic+drainage+pipe+large

Yes. Beats my idea. A row of pipes each ten feet in diameter, u-shapes, over the top of the dam, extending ten feet below the level of the lake on the water side and the same over the fall. Removeable plug on the outside hole. Fill with water, remove plug over the drop, siphon. That size pipe would fit on a flatbed truck (Might blow the tires though).

I live in Sacramento three blocks from the American River where the water was at the foot of the levee two days ago (maybe 15 feet below the top, but it still looked like the Mississippi to me in it's width compared to normal).

To any snide commenters here, I am not having any fun laughing at the a-holes who have effed up my State, this beautiful and amazing territory.

Whether the failure of the Oroville dam spillway was due to lack of maintenance remains to be seen. Cracks were repaired recently (2007 or so). It was a 1957 dam design.

Yes, I know our roads have been neglected, but dams? That jury's out as far as I know.

In 1997, I saw the water rise on the American River to within two feet of the top of the levee. This is very scary shit. I live in River Park. Check it out on your Google Map. In 1986, we were a few hours from evacuation, too, as in 1997.

Thank God that after Katrina in New Orleans, we got a rehab of our levees, but flood may still come. We have a forecast of a week of rain to come around Wednesday.

It is incredibly stressing to worry about what to take and abandon and leave your home to the mercy of the weather gods, and where to go? (All the motels etc are filled up with evacuees from the north. And I don't have any friends or relatives to evacuate to. (Hey, Steve, up for guests?)

The people north of us are going through some horrible moments and days. God bless and protect them.

No, Steve, from what I understand, Sacramento is in no great danger from Lake Orroville collapsing. The radius of the water dispersing across the Valley is very wide before it reaches us (thank God).

There are several Sikh temples in the Sacramento area offering shelter.

Yes, and here's the thing: How do we know this upcoming week will be the Ultimate Crisis of 2017. It's not impossible for there to be even heavier rains in March and, perhaps, early April. So if somebody could come up with a plan that would take a month to get operational, it might turn out to be highly useful during the Great Late March Storm of 2017.

I wonder if anyone has experimented with using those water-filled plastic highway barriers (the ones shaped like concrete barriers), perhaps anchored by submerged barriers on the lake side, to temporarily extend the height of the dam and the spill walls.

The higher the water, the deeper the soak into the dam and surrounding hillsides; a no-go for an earthen dam. Maybe a very temporary strategy for a concrete dam in a rocky canyon; but if you are facing more inflow, it exacerbates the possible deluge.

Why is the spillway so straight & narrow though? One would like to think there would be water brakes in the middle to get rid of the unleashed potential energy of the falling water masses.

Why is the spillway so straight & narrow though? One would like to think there would be water brakes in the middle to get rid of the unleashed potential energy of the falling water masses.

Quite the reverse. Any “braking” you put into the spillway generates force on the spillway. Completely smooth “frictionless”–the old non-physical physics problem standard–flow and you could make it out of sheet plastic. Start putting in “braking”–i.e. friction–and the more it needs to be hard and firmly attached to the bedrock. The more costly and the more prone to failure.

And here’s what it looks like after the latest rainstorm as the bottom half of the spillway has more or less exploded, with huge chunks of concrete flying through the air, with the water carving a new canyon down to bedrock.

I’m not sure this won’t be just fine. I’ve visited a lot of waterfalls including some pretty tall ones. Water has been banging away at rock for a very long time in a lot of places. Over time there is–obviously–erosion. But hard rock is tough stuff.

But that’s the key question–how hard is the rock?

I’m assuming the dam itself is firmly anchored in the bedrock. If the rock is good, having the bottom of the spillway churning around in exposed but solid bedrock … no big deal. Only if it’s poorly consolidated rock, and fails under the spilway back to dam do you have a problem–a big problem!

But if the rock the damn is anchored to is solid Sierra Nevada 100 million year old granite–that stuff has some “character” and can take some abuse, as you can see in California’s National Parks–you’re fine. You’ve just got another waterfall tourist attraction.

But to relieve the pressure on California’s water system, he is issuing an executive order baring any immigration to California. But since immigrants are free to move within the United States, he’s extending the immigration ban, nationwide.

And to further lighten the load on California, he’s immediately ordering mandatory E-verify for California businesses, and ordering Homeland Security to go all out on workplace enforcement raids, with any illegal aliens found by either measure, immediately deported.

These measures will lighten the population and resource consumption load on California’s neglected infrastructure and give all Californians a better quality of life.

This morning I heard the schills on NPR emphasising that the dam was built when Reagan was California's governor and suggesting that it wasn't adequatey tested.

Even though immediately afterward, an expert from UC Davis was explaining that one cannot empirically test dams against these kinds of contingencies until they are actually produced by nature, the seed was planted. The invidious propaganda we will always have with us.

What we have and has happened a lot in the past is the pig in the python problem. A lot of rain (or snowmelt) dumping into the Sacramento River and all its tributaries creating a mass that takes days to disperse into the SF Bay and ocean. But before it does, another pig comes down the pike (to mix metaphors). We’re facing a whole series of pigs now as Steve pointed out. Rain and snowmelt.

And the bastards refuse to build any more water storage areas. No new dams. Nothing for what, 50 years? God, I hate my state gov’t.

I never complained about the so-called drought because, guess what? I live between two rivers that always flow with fresh water. The north has water. Always does even in low rain years.

This is the third time I’ve been through this (not over yet this year) in 30 years. It is harrowing.

(And spare me bullshit about MOVE. Wait until nature grabs you buy the balls and smashes your little homestead to bits. Nature, if you haven’t noticed, is everywhere. Humans live where there is water, even where it’s overabundant at times.)

Much of Texas lives in desert-like areas for what it is worth. They make do and complain about the alternatively hot and freezing temperatures, while becoming an increasingly surly yet hospitable people with open carry gun laws.

Yes. The Auburn Dam could be a great legacy for Trump and any willing CA politicians. But they won't.

Of course, that particular Dam wouldn't help with this situation. Really, nature (God), is in control of all this and we can only watch when the waters rise. Japan thought it was ready for earthquakes and tsunamis, but when the really big one came they still had to watch the death and devastation.

Sorry to get all apocalyptic there. Sacramento will be okay. You can always stay with us in Roseville.

And here’s what it looks like after the latest rainstorm as the bottom half of the spillway has more or less exploded, with huge chunks of concrete flying through the air, with the water carving a new canyon down to bedrock.

I'm not sure this won't be just fine. I've visited a lot of waterfalls including some pretty tall ones. Water has been banging away at rock for a very long time in a lot of places. Over time there is--obviously--erosion. But hard rock is tough stuff.

But that's the key question--how hard is the rock?

I'm assuming the dam itself is firmly anchored in the bedrock. If the rock is good, having the bottom of the spillway churning around in exposed but solid bedrock ... no big deal. Only if it's poorly consolidated rock, and fails under the spilway back to dam do you have a problem--a big problem!

But if the rock the damn is anchored to is solid Sierra Nevada 100 million year old granite--that stuff has some "character" and can take some abuse, as you can see in California's National Parks--you're fine. You've just got another waterfall tourist attraction.

It’s not rock at all. It’s critical to understand that this is an earthfill dam, susceptible to rapid erosion.

Must say a lot of the coverage (even the wiki entry) is a tad vague – wiki has a picture showing “the main service spillway (right) and emergency spillway (left)” as if they’re right next to each other, whereas the videos and diagram show a gap. And “auxiliary spillway” is interchanged with “emergency spillway”.

I wonder how much of the main spillway will have gone by daylight? It must be about 2 a.m. in California. How much of the earth under the spillway will have gone, and could that undermine the top? Can anyone find diagrams, cross-sections? And is there a problem with letting water through the turbines, or can’t it get out fast enough (or are they blocked by debris)?

The power station under the dam can outflow something like 12,000 cubic feet of water per second, but that has been turned off due to debris from the main spillway threatening the expensive turbines. It would be useful to get the debris cleared.

Here's a question, whatever happened to the diversion tunnels dug during the construction of the dam? From Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam

"Two concrete-lined diversion tunnels, each 4,400 feet (1,300 m) long and 35 feet (11 m) in diameter, were excavated to channel the Feather River around the dam site. One of the tunnels was located at river level and would carry normal water flows, while the second one would only be used during floods.[13] ...

"On December 22, 1964, disaster nearly struck when the Feather River, after days of heavy rain, reached a peak flow of 250,000 cubic feet per second (7,100 m3/s) above the Oroville Dam site. The water rose behind the partially completed embankment dam and nearly overtopped it, while a maximum of 157,000 cubic feet per second (4,400 m3/s) poured from the diversion tunnels."

Okay, so there used to be two diversion tunnels that could outflow 157,000 cubic feet of water per second. That's a lot. Do they still exist? Are they under water? Were they sealed? Could deep sea divers or a submarine unseal them?

The power station under the dam can outflow something like 12,000 cubic feet of water per second, but that has been turned off due to debris from the main spillway threatening the expensive turbines. It would be useful to get the debris cleared.

Here's a question, whatever happened to the diversion tunnels dug during the construction of the dam? From Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam

"Two concrete-lined diversion tunnels, each 4,400 feet (1,300 m) long and 35 feet (11 m) in diameter, were excavated to channel the Feather River around the dam site. One of the tunnels was located at river level and would carry normal water flows, while the second one would only be used during floods.[13] ...

"On December 22, 1964, disaster nearly struck when the Feather River, after days of heavy rain, reached a peak flow of 250,000 cubic feet per second (7,100 m3/s) above the Oroville Dam site. The water rose behind the partially completed embankment dam and nearly overtopped it, while a maximum of 157,000 cubic feet per second (4,400 m3/s) poured from the diversion tunnels."

Okay, so there used to be two diversion tunnels that could outflow 157,000 cubic feet of water per second. That's a lot. Do they still exist? Are they under water? Were they sealed? Could deep sea divers or a submarine unseal them?

The power station under the dam can outflow something like 12,000 cubic feet of water per second, but that has been turned off due to debris from the main spillway threatening the expensive turbines. It would be useful to get the debris cleared.

Here's a question, whatever happened to the diversion tunnels dug during the construction of the dam? From Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam

"Two concrete-lined diversion tunnels, each 4,400 feet (1,300 m) long and 35 feet (11 m) in diameter, were excavated to channel the Feather River around the dam site. One of the tunnels was located at river level and would carry normal water flows, while the second one would only be used during floods.[13] ...

"On December 22, 1964, disaster nearly struck when the Feather River, after days of heavy rain, reached a peak flow of 250,000 cubic feet per second (7,100 m3/s) above the Oroville Dam site. The water rose behind the partially completed embankment dam and nearly overtopped it, while a maximum of 157,000 cubic feet per second (4,400 m3/s) poured from the diversion tunnels."

Okay, so there used to be two diversion tunnels that could outflow 157,000 cubic feet of water per second. That's a lot. Do they still exist? Are they under water? Were they sealed? Could deep sea divers or a submarine unseal them?

Good helicopter video from yesterday here from KCRA3, Steve, looks as if water's seeping through the earth on the left side of the 'emergency spillway'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FPDwC0csdk

Must say a lot of the coverage (even the wiki entry) is a tad vague - wiki has a picture showing "the main service spillway (right) and emergency spillway (left)" as if they're right next to each other, whereas the videos and diagram show a gap. And "auxiliary spillway" is interchanged with "emergency spillway".

I wonder how much of the main spillway will have gone by daylight? It must be about 2 a.m. in California. How much of the earth under the spillway will have gone, and could that undermine the top? Can anyone find diagrams, cross-sections? And is there a problem with letting water through the turbines, or can't it get out fast enough (or are they blocked by debris)?

The power station under the dam can outflow something like 12,000 cubic feet of water per second, but that has been turned off due to debris from the main spillway threatening the expensive turbines. It would be useful to get the debris cleared.

Here’s a question, whatever happened to the diversion tunnels dug during the construction of the dam? From Wikipedia:

“Two concrete-lined diversion tunnels, each 4,400 feet (1,300 m) long and 35 feet (11 m) in diameter, were excavated to channel the Feather River around the dam site. One of the tunnels was located at river level and would carry normal water flows, while the second one would only be used during floods.[13] …

“On December 22, 1964, disaster nearly struck when the Feather River, after days of heavy rain, reached a peak flow of 250,000 cubic feet per second (7,100 m3/s) above the Oroville Dam site. The water rose behind the partially completed embankment dam and nearly overtopped it, while a maximum of 157,000 cubic feet per second (4,400 m3/s) poured from the diversion tunnels.”

Okay, so there used to be two diversion tunnels that could outflow 157,000 cubic feet of water per second. That’s a lot. Do they still exist? Are they under water? Were they sealed? Could deep sea divers or a submarine unseal them?

“The People’s Daily has maintained that the dam was designed to survive a once-in-1000-years flood (300 mm of rainfall per day) but a once-in-2000-years flood occurred in August 1975, following the collision of Typhoon Nina and a cold front… Communication with the dam was largely lost due to wire failures. On August 6, a request to open the dam was rejected because of the existing flooding in downstream areas. On August 7 the request was accepted, but the telegrams failed to reach the dam. The sluice gates were not able to handle the overflow of water partially due to sedimentation blockage.

To protect other dams from failure, several flood diversion areas were evacuated and inundated, and several dams were deliberately destroyed by air strikes to release water in desired directions. The Nihewa and Laowangpo flood diversion areas downstream of the dams soon exceeded their capacity and gave up part of their storage on August 8, forcing more flood diversion areas to begin to evacuate. The dikes on the Quan River collapsed in the evening of August 9, and the entire Linquan county in Fuyang, Anhui was inundated. As the Boshan Dam, with a capacity of 400 million m3, crested and the water released from the failures of Banqiao and Shimantan was rushing downstream, air strikes were made against several other dams to protect the Suya Lake dam, already holding 1.2 billion m3 of water. Suya Lake won only a temporary reprieve, as both it and Boshan became eventual targets. Finally, the Bantai Dam, holding 5.7 billion m3 of water, was bombed.

According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, approximately 26,000 people died at the province from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. In addition, about 5,960,000 buildings collapsed, and 11 million residents were affected. Unofficial estimates of the number of people killed by the disaster have run as high as 230,000 people.”

Just seen your post, Steve (don’t you sleep?) – 157,000 cf/s is 50% above what’s going down the main spillway, so that would take a huge amount of pressure off. I wonder what